Quentin did not reply to the charges they made against him, but when El Pende told him that if he continued his pranks he would throw him out of the house, the thought that was in Quentin’s heart rushed to his lips.
“It makes no difference to me,” he cried, “because you are not my father.”
El Pende boxed the boy’s ears; the mother wept; and that night Quentin left the house and roamed the fields half-starved, until Palomares, the clerk, found him and brought him to his parents.
The boy began to take notice of things, and made it plain to his mother that instead of studying Latin, he preferred to learn French and go to America, as a schoolmate of his—the son of a Swiss watch-maker—had done.
Accordingly they took him to the academy of a French emigré, a violent republican, who, at the same time that he taught his pupils to conjugate the verb avoir, spoke to them enthusiastically about Danton, Robespierre, and Hoche.
Perhaps this excited Quentin’s imagination; perhaps it did not need to be excited; at any rate, one Sunday morning he decided to put into execution his great projét de voyage.
His mother was accustomed to hide the key to the cabinet where she kept her money under her pillow. While she was at mass, Quentin seized the key, opened the cabinet, stuffed the seventy dollars that he found there into his pocket, and a few minutes later was calmly increasing the distance between himself and his home.
Fifteen days after his escape he was apprehended in Cadiz just as he was about to set sail for America, and was brought back to Cordova in the custody of the guardia civil.
Then his mother took him to a monastery, but Quentin had made up his mind to run away from everything, so he attempted to escape several times. At the end of a month, the friars intimated that they did not wish to keep him any longer.
To the boys of his age, Quentin was now the prototype of wildness, impudence, and disobedience. People predicted an evil future for him.