fy my father's confidence in me. But
lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from him, with secret delight;
but now that I shared the burden of his affairs, of his name and of his
house, I would secretly have given up my fortune and my hopes for
him, as I was sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the
sacrifice! So when M. de Villele exhumed, for our special benefit, an
imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had ruined us, I authorized
the sale of my property, only retaining an island in the middle of
the Loire where my mother was buried. Perhaps arguments and evasions,
philosophical, philanthropic, and political considerations would not
fail me now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor termed
a 'folly'; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow with
generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's eyes were
to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought of those tears has
often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after he had paid his creditors, my
father died of grief; I was his idol, and he had ruined me! The thought
killed him. Towards the end of the autumn of 1826, at the age of
twenty-two, I was the sole mourner at his graveside--the grave of my
father and my earliest friend. Not many young men have found themselves
alone with their thoughts as they followed a hearse, or have seen
themselves lost in crowded Paris, and without money or prospects.
Orphans rescued by public charity have at any rate the future of the
battlefield before them, and find a shelter in some institution and a
father in the government or in the _procureur du roi_. I had nothing.

"Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven hundred and twelve
francs, the net proceeds of the winding up of my father's affairs. Our
creditors had driven us to sell our furniture. From my childhood I had
been used to set a high value on the articles of luxury about us, and
I could not help showing my astonishment at the sight of this meagre
balance.

"'Oh, rococo, all of it!' said the auctioneer. A terrible word that fell
like a blight on the sacred memories of my childhood, and dispelled my
earliest illusions, the dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised
in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag with eleven
hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood before me in the
person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on while he spoke.
Jonathan, an old servant who was much at