t, though veiled by lids which droop from timidity
contradicting desire; when the soul bends not to worldly Jesuitism,
and the heart throbs as violently from trepidation as from the generous
impulses of young emotion.

I need say nothing of the journey I made with my mother from Paris to
Tours. The coldness of her behavior repressed me. At each relay I tried
to speak; but a look, a word from her frightened away the speeches I had
been meditating. At Orleans, where we had passed the night, my mother
complained of my silence. I threw myself at her feet and clasped her
knees; with tears I opened my heart. I tried to touch hers by the
eloquence of my hungry love in accents that might have moved a
stepmother. She replied that I was playing comedy. I complained that she
had abandoned me. She called me an unnatural child. My whole nature was
so wrung that at Blois I went upon the bridge to drown myself in the
Loire. The height of the parapet prevented my suicide.

When I reached home, my two sisters, who did not know me, showed
more surprise than tenderness. Afterwards, however, they seemed, by
comparison, to be full of kindness towards me. I was given a room on the
third story. You will understand the extent of my hardships when I tell
you that my mother left me, a young man of twenty, without other linen
than my miserable school outfit, or any other outside clothes than those
I had long worn in Paris. If I ran from one end of the room to the other
to pick up her handkerchief, she took it with the cold thanks a lady
gives to her footman. Driven to watch her to find if there were any soft
spot where I could fasten the rootlets of affection, I came to see
her as she was,--a tall, spare woman, given to cards, egotistical and
insolent, like all the Listomeres, who count insolence as part of their
dowry. She saw nothing in life except duties to be fulfilled. All
cold women whom I have known made, as she did, a religion of duty; she
received our homage as a priest receives the incense of the mass. My
elder brother appeared to absorb the trifling sentiment of maternity
which was in her nature. She stabbed us constantly with her sharp
irony,--the weapon of those who have no heart,--and which she used
against us, who could make her no reply.

Notwithstanding these thorny hindrances, the instinctive sentiments
have so many roots, the religious fear inspired by a mother whom it
is dangerous to displease holds by so many threads, that