Misfortunes are said never to come singly, and the same may be said of passions: they come together, like the Muses or the Furies. With the propensity which began to torture me, there was born in me the sense of honor, an exaltation of the soul which preserves the heart uncorrupted in the midst of corruption, a sort of restorative principle placed beside a devouring principle, as the inexhaustible source of the prodigies which love demands of youth and of the sacrifices which it imposes.
When the weather was fine, the college boarders went out on Thursdays and Sundays. We were often taken to Mont Dol, on the top of which were some Gallo-Roman ruins: from the summit of this isolated eminence, the eye looks down on the sea and on marshes over which by night hovers the will o' the wisp, the wizard's light that burns in our lamps to this day. Another object of our walks was the fields in which stood a seminary of Eudists, after Eudes, brother of Mézeray the historian[112] and founder of their congregation. One day in May, the Abbé Égault, the prefect of the week, had taken us to this seminary. We were allowed full liberty in our games; only we were expressly forbidden to climb the trees. The master left us in a grassy lane, and walked away to say his breviary.
The lane was bordered by elms: right at the top of the tallest, a magpie's nest was clearly visible. We were all agog at the sight, pointing out to each other the mother sitting on her eggs, and smitten with the keenest longing to capture that superb prize. But who would dare to make the attempt? The orders were so strict, the prefect so near, the tree so high! Every hope was turned upon me; I climbed like a cat. I wavered, and then love of glory carried the day: taking off my coat, I flung my arms around the elm and began the ascent. The trunk had no branches, except at two-thirds of its height, where it split into a fork, one of whose extremities bore the nest.
A Painful Predicament.
Gathered beneath the tree, my friends applauded my efforts, looking up at me, looking in the direction whence the prefect might come, stamping with joy in their hope of the eggs, trembling with fear in their expectation of punishment. I approached the nest; the magpie flew away; I seized the eggs, put them inside my shirt, and began to climb down. Unfortunately, I slipped between the twin sections of the trunk and remained seated astraddle. The tree had been pruned, I could find no foothold on either side by which to raise myself and recover the outer limb, and I remained hanging in mid-air, fifty feet from the ground.
Suddenly a cry arose of "The prefect is coming!" and I saw myself incontinently abandoned by my friends, as always happens. One boy alone, called Le Gobbien, tried to assist me, and was soon obliged to relinquish his generous attempt. There was only one way to extricate myself from my painful position, which was to hang on outside, by my hands, to one of the two teeth of the fork, and to try, with my feet, to seize the trunk below the place where it split in two. I carried out this operation at the risk of my life. In the midst of my tribulations, I had not let go of my prize; I should have done better to fling it away, as I have since done with so many others. In sliding down the trunk, I rubbed the skin off my hands, bruised my legs and chest, and smashed the eggs: this last proved my ruin. The prefect had not seen me in the tree; I contrived to hide the traces of blood, but there was no concealing the brilliant yellow with which I was smeared.
"Very well, sir," he said, "you shall have the cane."
If that man had stated that he would commute this sentence to one of death, I should have experienced a thrill of joy. The notion of shame had never yet presented itself to one of my untrammeled upbringing: at no period of my life would I not have preferred any punishment to the horror of having to blush before a living creature. My heart filled with indignation; I answered the Abbé Égault, in the accents not of a child but of a man, that neither he nor any other should ever lay a hand upon me. This reply incensed him; he called me a rebel and promised to make an example of me.
"We shall see," I retorted, and began to play at ball with a coolness which confounded him.
We returned to the college; the prefect took me to his room and ordered me to prepare for punishment. My exalted sentiments gave place to floods of tears. I represented to the Abbé Égault that he had taught me Latin; that I was his scholar, his disciple, his child; that he could not wish to dishonor his pupil and make the sight of my schoolfellows unbearable to me; that he could lock me up on bread and water, stop my recreations, set me impositions; that I would thank him for his clemency and love him the more for it. I fell upon my knees, I folded my hands, I besought him in the name of Jesus Christ to spare me; he remained deaf to my entreaties. I rose in a fit of fury, and aimed at his legs a kick so violent that he yelled. He limped to the door of his room, locked it, and came back to me. I entrenched myself behind the bed; he struck out at me across the bed with a cane. I rolled myself in the bed-clothes and, heated with the fray, exclaimed: