--the wreck of my heart and the fragments of my will; I
gave myself to him whole. In one of those touching theories of pagan
religion, the victim sacrificed to the false gods goes to the altar
decked with flowers. The significance of that custom has always deeply
touched me. A sacrifice is nothing without grace. My life is simple and
without the very slightest romance. My father, who has made his own way
in the world, is a stern, inflexible man; he treats his wife and his
children as he treats himself. I have never seen a smile upon his lips.
His iron hand, his stern face, his gloomy, rough activity, oppressed
us all--wife, children, clerks and servants--under an almost savage
despotism. I could--I speak for myself only--I could have accommodated
myself to this life if the power thus exercised had had an equal
repression; but, captious and vacillating, he treated us all with
intolerable alternations. We were always ignorant whether we were doing
right or whether he considered us to blame; and the horrible expectancy
which results from that is torture in domestic life. A street life seems
better than a home under such circumstances. Had I been alone in the
house I would have borne all from my father without murmuring; but my
heart was torn by the bitter, unceasing anguish of my dear mother, whom
I ardently loved and whose tears put me sometimes into a fury in which I
nearly lost my reason. My school days, when boys are usually so full of
misery and hard work, were to me a golden period. I dreaded holidays.
My mother herself preferred to come and see me. When I had finished
my philosophical course and was forced to return home and become my
father's clerk, I could not endure it more than a few months; my mind,
bewildered by the fever of adolescence, threatened to give way. On a sad
autumn evening as I was walking alone with my mother along the Boulevard
Bourdon, then one of the most melancholy parts of Paris, I poured my
heart into hers, and I told her that I saw no possible life before me
except in the Church. My tastes, my ideas, all that I most loved would
be continually thwarted so long as my father lived. Under the cassock of
a priest he would be forced to respect me, and I might thus on certain
occasions become the protector of my family. My mother wept much. Just
at this period my eldest brother (since a general and killed at Leipzig)
had entered the army as a private soldier, driven from his home for the
same reason