k, as in other youthful writings,
he follows as well as he can the authors in vogue--Rousseau, and
especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades,
their sentimental declamation, and their humanitarian grandiloquence.
But these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him;
they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine; they require too much
circumspection in walking; he does not know how to put them on, and they
rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he
does not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words,
the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance
of imagery;[1119] he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of
incongruities, incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly
stumbling along through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through
excess of ardor and of heat;[1120] his jerking, eruptive thought,
overcharged with passion, indicates the depth and temperature of its
source. Already, at the Academy, the professor of belles-lettres[1121]
notes down that "in the strange and incorrect grandeur of his
amplifications he seems to see granite fused in a volcano." However
original in mind and in sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society
around him, different from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the
current ideas which take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other,
it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other,
although accepting neither.--Pensioner of the king, who supported him at
Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also supported his
sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the benefactor of his
family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful
letters over his mother's signature--he does not regard him as his born
general; it does not enter his mind to take sides and draw his sword in
his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier
has certified; reared in a school of noble cadets, he has no noble or
monarchical traditions.[1122]--Poor and tormented by ambition, a reader
of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking together sentences of
philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the jargon of the day,
it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a decent,
academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the