En l'an du Christ mil sept cent quatre-vingt,
Chez un tailleur, mon pauvre et vieux grand-pere,
Moi, nouveau-ne, sachais ce qui m'advint."

(In this Paris full of gold and misery,
In the year of Christ one thousand seven hundred and eighty,
At the house of a tailor, my grandfather poor and old,
I, a new-born child, knew what happened to me.)

Authors of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries are more
subjective in their writings than those of the seventeenth, whose
characters can rarely be known from their works. A glance at the life
and surroundings of Beranger will show their influence on his genius.

Beranger's mother was abandoned by her husband shortly after her
marriage, and her child was born at the house of her father, the old
tailor referred to in the song 'The Tailor and the Fairy.' She troubled
herself little about the boy, and he was forsaken in his childhood.
Beranger tells us that he does not know how he learned to read. In the
beginning of the year 1789 he was sent to a school in the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, and there, mounted on the roof of a house, he saw the
capture of the Bastille on the 14th of July. This event made a great
impression on him, and may have laid the foundations of his republican
principles. When he was nine and a half his father sent him to one of
his sisters, an innkeeper at Peronne, that town in the north of France
famous for the interview in 1468 between Louis XI. and Charles the Bold,
when the fox put himself in the power of the lion, as related so vividly
in 'Quentin Durward.'

Beranger's aunt was very kind to him. At Peronne he went to a free
primary school founded by Ballue de Bellenglise, where the students
governed themselves, electing their mayor, their judges, and their
justices of the peace. Beranger was president of a republican club of
boys, and was called upon several times to address members of the
Convention who passed through Peronne. His aunt was an ardent
republican, and he was deeply moved by the invasion of France in 1792.
He heard with delight of the capture of Toulon in 1793 and of
Bonaparte's exploits, conceiving a great admiration for the
extraordinary man who was just beginning his military career. At the age
of fifteen Beranger returned to Paris, where his father had established
a kind of banking house. The boy had previously followed different
trades, and had been for two years with a publishing house as