My recollection of Monsieur Hallays-Dabot and his wife is as clear and distinct as though they were present here. Nothing could exceed the warm-hearted kindness of my reception in their house. It sufficed to dispel my horror of a system from which I had an instinctive shirking. The almost paternal care they gave me quite destroyed this feeling, and allayed the doubts I had entertained as to the possibility of being happy in a boarding-school.
The two years I spent in his house were, in fact, two of the happiest in my life; his even-handed justice and his kindly affection never failed.
When I reached the age of eleven it was decided that my education should be continued at the Lycée St. Louis. When I left Monsieur Hallays-Dabot's care, he gave me a certificate of character so flattering in its terms that I refrain from reproducing it. I have felt it a duty to make this public acknowledgment of all he did for me.
The good testimonials I brought from Monsieur Hallays-Dabot's establishment gained me a quart de bourse at the Lycée St. Louis,[1] which I accordingly entered at the close of the holidays in October 1829. I was then just eleven years old.
The then Principal of the Lycée was an ecclesiastic, the Abbé Ganser, a gentle, quiet-natured man much inclined to meditation, and very paternal in his dealings with his pupils.
I was at once put into what was known as the sixth class. From the outset of my school career I had the good fortune of being under a man who, in the course of the years I studied with him, gained my deepest affection—Adolphe Régnier, Membre de l'Institut, my dear and honoured master, formerly the tutor, and still, as I write, the friend of the Comte de Paris.
I was not stupid, and as a rule my teachers liked me; but I must confess I was very careless, and was often punished for inattention, even more so during preparation hours than in the actual school-work.
I mentioned that I joined St. Louis as a "quarter scholar." This means that my college fees were reduced one-quarter. It was incumbent on me to endeavour, by diligence and good conduct, to rise to the position of half scholar, three-quarter scholar, and finally to that of full scholar, and so relieve my mother of the expense of keeping me at college. Seeing I adored my mother, and that my greatest joy should therefore have been to help her by my own exertions, this sacred object ought to have been ever present with me.
But woe is me! Instincts forcibly repressed are apt to wake again with tenfold fierceness. And so mine did, many a time and often—far too often, alas!
One day I had got into a scrape for some piece of carelessness or other, some exercise unfinished, or lesson left unlearnt. I suppose I thought my punishment out of proportion to my crime, for I complained, the sole result being that the penalty was largely increased. I was marched off to the college prison, a sort of dungeon, where I was to be kept on bread and water till I had finished an enormous imposition of I know not how many lines, some five hundred or a thousand, I think—something absurd, I know! When I found myself under lock and key I began to think I was a brute. The feelings of Orestes when the Furies reproached him with his mother's death were not more bitter than mine when I was given my prison fare! I looked at the bread, and burst into tears. "Oh! you scoundrel, you brute, you beast," I cried; "look at the bread your mother earns for you! Your mother who is coming to see you after school, and will hear you are in prison, and will go home weeping through the streets, without having seen or kissed you! Come, come, you are a wretch; you do not even deserve to have dry bread!"