Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and Les Mystères de Paris, Le Juif Errant, and others.
But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school. It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those well-spent hours!
[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark slum—how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled consciousness for months:
Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
File, File, ma quenouille:
_File sa corde au bourreau
Qui siffle dans le préau.
[Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!">[
Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few years.
I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close by—a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books I asked for!