Among other works my father owned a translation of Shakespeare in two volumes, which they put on my chair to raise my seat at table. They left me without thinking how these volumes illustrated by engravings would very soon incite my curiosity to read the text. There was a Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands in presence of a frightened physician and a servant, and Othello entering Desdemona’s chamber with a poniard in his hand, and bending his black face toward the white, sleeping form, a King Lear tearing his clothing under the zigzags of the lightning, a Richard III. asleep in his tent and surrounded by specters.
From the accompanying text I read, before my tenth year, fragments which made me familiar with all these dramas which exalted my imagination, in so far as I could seize the meaning of them, without doubt because they were written for popular audiences, and admit an element of primitive poetry, and an infantine exaggeration.
I loved these kings, who, joyous or despairing, defiled past at the head of their armies, who lost or gained battles in a few minutes, I enjoyed this slaughter accompanied by a flourish of trumpets behind the scenes, the rapid passages from one country to another, and the chimerical geography. In brief, whatever there is in these dramas and especially in the chronicles that is very much abridged, almost rudimentary, so charmed me, that when I was alone I played with the chairs, imagining them to be Lancaster, Warwick, or Gloucester.
My father, who had an extreme repugnance to the troublesome realities of life, relished in Shakespeare that which is simple and touching, the profiles of women so delicately drawn; Imogene and Desdemona, Cordelia and Rosalind pleased him, though the comparison may seem strange, for the same reason that he enjoyed the romances of Dickens, Topffer and even the child’s play of Florian and Berquin.
Here we may see the contrasts which prove the incoherence of artistic judgments which are founded upon sentimental impression. I also read all these books, and those of Walter Scott, as well as the rural tales of George Sand, in an illustrated edition. It would certainly have been better for me not to have nourished my imagination on elements so incongruous and sometimes dangerous. But at my age I could not understand more than a quarter of the sentences, and while my father was toiling at his blackboard, combining his formulas, I believe that the lightning might have struck the house without his knowing it, carried away as he was by the all-powerful demon of abstraction.
My mother, to whom this demon is as much a stranger as the beast of the Apocalypse, did not wait long, after the first hours of our trouble had passed, before she rummaged the room in which I studied; and, under an exercise, she discovered a large, open book—Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”
“What book is this?” she asked, “who permitted you to take it?”
“But I have read it once already,” I replied.
“And these?” she continued, in looking over the little library where by the side of schoolbooks, were, beside the Shakespeare, the “Nouvelles Génevoises” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Rob Boy” and “La Mare au Diable.” “These are not suitable for a person of your age,” she insisted, “and you may help me carry all these books into the parlor, and put them in your father’s library.”
So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white hands in their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she always carried with her. Then she added severely: