The curtain was up, and the piece had commenced: they were playing the Père de famille[107]. I saw two men walk about the stage talking, while everybody looked on. I took them for the managers of the puppet-show, chatting before the time came for Madame Gigogne to tumble head over heels, awaiting the arrival of the audience: I was only surprised that they should discuss their business so loudly, and that they were listened to in silence. My amazement increased when other persons came upon the stage and began to make great gestures and shed tears, and when everybody began to cry in sympathy. The curtain fell without my having understood a word of all this. My brother went down to the green-room between the acts. I remained in the box among strangers, in an agony of shyness, and wished myself back at school. That was the first impression which I received of the art of Sophocles and Molière.
The third year of my life at Dol was marked by the wedding of my two eldest sisters: Marianne married the Comte de Marigny, and Bénigne the Comte de Québriac. They accompanied their husbands to Fougères: the first signal for the dispersion of a family whose members were soon to part. My sisters received the nuptial benediction at Combourg on the same day, at the same hour, at the same altar, in the castle chapel[108]. They wept, my mother wept; I was astonished at their grief: I understand it now. I never assist at a christening or a wedding without smiling bitterly or feeling anguish of heart. After the misfortune of being born, I know none greater than that of giving birth to a human being.
In this same year began a revolution, not only in my family, but in my own person. Chance caused to fall into my hands two very different books: an unexpurgated Horace and a history of Confessions mal faites. An incredible perturbation of ideas was produced in my mind by these two books: an unknown world arose around me. On the one side, I suspected the existence of secrets incomprehensible to one of my age, of a manner of living different from mine, of pleasures beyond my vision, of charms of an unknown nature in a sex in which I had only met a mother and sisters; on the other side, spectres dragging chains and vomiting flames threatened me with eternal torture for one sin concealed. I could not sleep; at night I thought I saw black hands and white pass by turns through the curtains of my bed: I began to imagine that the latter hands were cursed by religion, and this idea increased my terror of the infernal shades. In vain I sought in Heaven and Hell for the explanation of a two-fold mystery. Smitten at one and the same time in my moral and physical being, I continued to struggle with my innocence against the storms of premature passion and the terrors of superstition.
Thenceforward I felt escape from me some sparks of that fire which is the transmission of life. I was construing the fourth book of the Æneid and reading Télémaque: suddenly I discovered in Dido and Eucharis beauties that delighted me; I felt the harmony of those admirable verses and of that classic prose. One day I translated Lucretius'
Æneadum genitrix, hominum divinumque voluptas[109]
at sight, with such spirit that M. Égault snatched the poem from my hands and set me to do my Greek roots. I stole a Tibullus: when I came to the
Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem[110],
these expressions of voluptuous melancholy seemed to reveal to me my own nature. The volumes of Massillon[111] which contained the sermons on the Pécheresse and the Enfant prodigue never left my side. I was allowed to read them, for no one suspected what I found in them. I stole short candle-ends from the chapel to enable me at night to read those alluring descriptions of the disorders of the soul. I fell asleep stammering incoherent phrases, in which I strove to employ the sweetness, the rhythm, and the grace of the writer who has been most successful in transmitting to prose the euphony of Racinian verse.
If, later, I have with some measure of truthfulness depicted the impulses which, mingled with Christian remorse, sway the heart, I am convinced that I owe this success to the chance which made me acquainted at the same moment with two hostile empires. The ravages made in my imagination by a bad book found their antidote in the terrors with which another book inspired me, and the latter were as it were allayed by the enervating thoughts drawn from pictures of the unveiled.