“Why don’t you look at this page?”
I made a gesture of disgust. It seemed commonplace to me—a father forgiving his son—what was there surprising in that?
Athalia wringing her hands in despair beside the temple wall, while the soldiers come running to kill her, recalled to my mother her convent. She had herself taken part in the chorus of that tragedy which Racine had written for the young pupils of Saint-Cyr, and which by a happy tradition all girls’ boarding schools used to present in those days; the Unes came back to her with a rush:
The universe is full of His magnificence:
Let us praise God and worship Him forever.
She would recite them with that emotion which religious things always awakened in her, and her tones touched me more directly than that sophisticated art which was beyond my powers.
Another little book had a part in opening my mind to poetry,—it was a book of ballads. A knight wandering in the forest, snatched away from Titania, queen of the elves and sylphs, her cup of happiness and carried it off to his castle on his galloping horse. A little girl on the bank of a stream sang the romance of the swan’s nest hidden among the reeds, and dreamed of a knight who should come upon a red roan steed. The Lord of Burleigh married a shepherdess, who languished in the palace to which he took her, and died of longing for her village and her cottage. How I entered into their longings and their melancholy! Their heartaches poured into my heart a delicious pain, which I could not fathom. Yet I was beginning to discern that we have within ourselves an upspringing fountain of infinitely delicate joys.
Did my father distrust these exciting readings as he did grandfather’s music? He brought me short, simple biographies of great men. It is never too early to make acquaintance with such. One forms a habit of comparing himself with the heroes, and doesn’t fail to say to oneself: “I have time before me; when I am their age I mean to have surpassed them....” By degrees one begins to look for those whose exploits come late in life. I do not know which of these exemplary personages it was of whom I read that he entered the school of adversity. I imagined that school to be at least as severe as the Polytechnic, or Saint-Cyr, to which my brother Bernard was destined, and I burned to present myself there for admission. I did not know that it is the only one that requires no examination, no preliminaries, above all, no recommendation. I confided my desire to my mother. She smiled, which vexed me, and assured me that I should indeed present myself there for admission, but she hoped it would be as late as possible.
These readings transported me into a glorious state of enthusiasm. I could not have understood sarcasm. No one made use of it in our family. There was only grandfather’s little laugh. Our parents loved gaiety, took pleasure even in the noise that we made, but they never used ridicule. They took life seriously, as an opportunity for well-doing, and deemed that it deserved the greatest respect. Grandfather, running through my books, on the first visit that he deigned to pay me after being assured that I was recovering, let fall certain exclamations:
“Oho! the Bible! and the Famous Men! Poor child! Just wait, I’ll bring you some books.”