ed in proportion as
the social spheres on which I entered widened. God knows what efforts I
made to weaken the decree which condemned me to live within myself! What
hopes, long cherished with eagerness of soul, were doomed to perish in
a day! To persuade my parents to come and see me, I wrote them letters
full of feeling, too emphatically worded, it may be; but surely such
letters ought not to have drawn upon me my mother's reprimand, coupled
with ironical reproaches for my style. Not discouraged even then,
I implored the help of my sisters, to whom I always wrote on their
birthdays and fete-days with the persistence of a neglected child; but
it was all in vain. As the day for the distribution of prizes approached
I redoubled my entreaties, and told of my expected triumphs. Misled by
my parents' silence, I expected them with a beating heart. I told my
schoolfellows they were coming; and then, when the old porter's step
sounded in the corridors as he called my happy comrades one by one to
receive their friends, I was sick with expectation. Never did that old
man call my name!

One day, when I accused myself to my confessor of having cursed my life,
he pointed to the skies, where grew, he said, the promised palm for the
"Beati qui lugent" of the Saviour. From the period of my first communion
I flung myself into the mysterious depths of prayer, attracted to
religious ideas whose moral fairyland so fascinates young spirits.
Burning with ardent faith, I prayed to God to renew in my behalf the
miracles I had read of in martyrology. At five years of age I fled to
my star; at twelve I took refuge in the sanctuary. My ecstasy
brought dreams unspeakable, which fed my imagination, fostered my
susceptibilities, and strengthened my thinking powers. I have often
attributed those sublime visions to the guardian angel charged with
moulding my spirit to its divine destiny; they endowed my soul with the
faculty of seeing the inner soul of things; they prepared my heart for
the magic craft which makes a man a poet when the fatal power is his to
compare what he feels within him with reality,--the great things aimed
for with the small things gained. Those visions wrote upon my brain a
book in which I read that which I must voice; they laid upon my lips the
coal of utterance.

My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the
Oratorian teachings, took me from Pont-le-Voy, and sent me to Paris to
an institution in the Marais.