I had discovered what I wished to know.
“In spite of what your grandmother says,” he added, “I do not love Robespierre, because he was born a Jacobin. One should not be born a Jacobin. A person may become one, but it is necessary first of all to have been a humanitarian. Ferocity is permissible only to defend one’s principles, or one’s country when it is in danger. In order to legitimatise it, there must be provocation.”
He had told me about the leaves of the sensitive plant, and, when he said something which displeased me, I would reply:
“Enough, papa, I fold myself up!” Then he would call me sensitive, and we would cease talking.
Sometimes it seemed to me that he actually probed in my brain as with a red-hot poker, as grandmother, also, too often did. I felt great pain in my temples, and would say:
“I can’t listen to you any longer. I feel ill.”
My father took a great journal, La Democratie Pacifique of Victor Considérant, to which he was one of the first subscribers. My grandmother did not read newspapers. She heard the news from grandfather, who read the Gazettes at his club. I thought my father admirable because he read four great pages every day, and knew at Blérancourt everything that was taking place in the whole world.
Later, in recalling what I had suffered in my childhood and the first years of my youth, I remembered that at that time it seemed to me that the “walls” of my brain were too light to support the pressure of the mass of ideas which my father and grandmother strove alternately to force between them. I felt these “walls” tremble at times and threaten to fall in.
I often played with the chemist’s daughter, Emilienne Decaisne, great-niece of Saint-Just. I thought her kind and charming, but my father said she was not sufficiently proud of her great-uncle. He often made his friend Decaisne angry—“the too lukewarm nephew of Saint-Just,” as he called him.
I went one day to see Saint-Just’s sister, Madame Decaisne, the chemist’s mother, and Emilienne’s grandmother. She lived at the extreme end of that beautiful quarter of Blérancourt called the Marais, where the lines of plane-trees perfumed the place in the spring, and where the ruins of the Louis XIV. château are so fine. Madame Decaisne inhabited a well-preserved house of the eighteenth century, looking on a garden, surrounded by high walls.