Thereupon I became possessed with the idea of this conventual life, and escaping from the school one fine afternoon I set out alone, determined and desperate, on the road to Pont Saint-Esprit, which winds along the banks of the Rhône, for I knew Valbonne was somewhere in that neighbourhood.
“There,” I said to myself, “I will go and knock at the door of the convent, imploring and weeping until they consent to admit me. Then once inside I will roam all day, in bliss, among the trees of the forest—I will steep myself in thoughts of God and sanctify myself as did the good Saint-Gent.”
Then suddenly a thought arrested me:
“And thy mother,” I said to myself, “to whom, miserable boy, thou hast not even bidden farewell, and who, when she learns thou hast disappeared, will seek thee by hill and by dale, poor woman, weeping disconsolate as did the mother of Gent!”
Turning about, with a heavy heart and hesitating steps I made my way back to the farm, in order to embrace my parents once more before forsaking the world; but the nearer I drew to the paternal home, the faster my monkish ideas and proud resolution melted in the warmth of my filial love, as a ball of snow dissolves before the fire. At the door of the farm, where I arrived late, my mother cried out in astonishment at the sight of me:
“But why have you left your school before the holidays?”
And I, already ashamed of my flight, replied in a broken voice: “I am home-sick—I cannot go back to that fat old Millet, where one has only carrots to eat.”
But the next day our shepherd, Ronquet, took me back to my abhorred jail, with the promise, however, that I should be liberated at the end of the term.
CHAPTER VII
THREE EARLY FELIBRES
Like the cats who continually move their young ones from place to place, at the opening of the next school year my mother took me off to Monsieur Dupuy, a native of Carpentras, who kept a school in Avignon near the Pont-Troué. And here, in furtherance of my ambitions as a budding Provençalist, I had indeed my “nozzle in the hay.”