he very moment when I was about to run away from Monsieur
Lepitre as he got into the coach,--a difficult process, for he was
as fat as Louis XVIII. and club-footed,--well, can you believe it, my
mother arrived in a post-chaise! Her glance arrested me; I stood
still, like a bird before a snake. What fate had brought her there? The
simplest thing in the world. Napoleon was then making his last efforts.
My father, who foresaw the return of the Bourbons, had come to Paris
with my mother to advise my brother, who was employed in the imperial
diplomatic service. My mother was to take me back with her, out of the
way of dangers which seemed, to those who followed the march of events
intelligently, to threaten the capital. In a few minutes, as it were, I
was taken out of Paris, at the very moment when my life there was about
to become fatal to me.

The tortures of imagination excited by repressed desires, the weariness
of a life depressed by constant privations had driven me to study, just
as men, weary of fate, confine themselves in a cloister. To me,
study had become a passion, which might even be fatal to my health by
imprisoning me at a period of life when young men ought to yield to the
bewitching activities of their springtide youth.

This slight sketch of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily
perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its
influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by
many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul,
filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly,
but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing its
final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in mind,
I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically at its
highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the tortuous
difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its plains. A strange
chance had held me long in that delightful period when the soul awakes
to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and the savor of life
is fresh. I stood in the period between puberty and manhood,--the one
prolonged by my excessive study, the other tardily developing its living
shoots. No young man was ever more thoroughly prepared to feel and to
love. To understand my history, let your mind dwell on that pure time
of youth when the mouth is innocent of falsehood; when the glance of
the eye is hones