old lady had reached the end
of her tether, and was conscientious enough to come and tell my mother
so. She said, "I have nothing more to teach her; she knows all that
I know better than I do myself." The Catholic faith revived in these
remote districts, with all its respectable gravity and, fortunately
for it, disencumbered of the worldly and temporal bonds which the
ancient _regime_ had forged for it.

This complexity of origin is, I believe, to a great extent the cause
of my seeming inconsistency. I am double, as it were, and one half
of me laughs while the other weeps. This is the explanation of my
cheerfulness. As I am two spirits in one body, one of them has always
cause to be content. While upon the one hand I was only anxious to be
a village priest or tutor in a seminary. I was all the time dreaming
the strangest dreams. During divine service I used to fall into long
reveries; my eyes wandered to the ceiling of the chapel, upon which
I read all sorts of strange things. My thoughts wandered to the great
men whom we read of in history. I was playing one day, when six years
old, with one of my cousins and other friends, and we amused ourselves
by selecting our future professions. "And what will you be?" my
cousin asked me. "I shall make books." "You mean that you will be a
bookseller." "Oh, no," I replied, "I mean to make books--to
compose them." These dawning dispositions needed time and favourable
circumstances to be developed, and what was so completely lacking in
all my surroundings was ability. My worthy tutors were not endowed
with any seductive qualities. With their unswerving moral solidity,
they were the very contrary of the southerners--of the Neapolitan, for
instance, who is all glitter and clatter. Ideas did not ring within
their minds with the sonorous clash of crossing swords. Their head was
like what a Chinese cap without bells would be; you might shake it,
but it would not jingle. That which constitutes the essence of talent,
the desire to show off one's thoughts to the best advantage, would
have seemed to them sheer frivolity, like women's love of dress, which
they denounced as a positive sin. This excessive abnegation of self,
this too ready disposition to repulse what the world at large likes by
an _Abrenuntio tibi, Satana_, is fatal to literature. It will be said,
perhaps, that literature necessarily implies more or less of sin. If
the Gascon tendency to elude many difficulties with a joke, whi