“Return and browse,” said my grandfather to his daughter, laughing, as he put a well-filled purse in her hand.
I remained, of course, with my grandparents. Neither my father nor mother would have dared at that epoch to question my staying.
It was some years after this that the long series of dramatic scenes began of which I was the cause, and which occasioned my being carried off many times.
The effort made by a matured mind to recall its early impressions is most curious. We evoke them, and they rise before us in the form of a little person whom we succeed in detaching from our present selves, but who, however, continues to remain a part of what we have become. The image, the vision of ourselves is clear and perfectly cut in our minds when we say: “When I was a child.” We see ourselves as we were at a certain age, but as soon as we particularise an event or question a fact we cannot escape from our present personality, and it is impossible to rid these facts and events from connection with it, or from their later consequences.
We should like to write of our childhood with the childish words we then used, but we cannot, and memory only suggests some striking traits, some simple phrases, which make clear the facts registered in the mind.
How many things more interesting than those we remember do we doubtless forget!
One day—it was not on a Sunday—my grandmother dressed me in a pretty white gown lined with pink and embroidered by herself with little wheels, which I had often watched her making. Later, overcome with emotion, I dressed my own daughter in this same gown.
“It is your birthday, the fourth of October, and you are three years old,” said my grandmother.
Three years! these words re-echoed in my head: there was something about them solemn and gay at once. To be grown up is a child’s ambition. Children create in their minds many surprising illusions. People said frequently to me, which made me very proud:
“She is very tall for her age. She looks five years old.” Those two figures, three and five, were the first I remembered, and I used them on every occasion. I looked at and compared myself with children smaller than I, and considered myself very tall indeed.