smile.

It was the child's misfortune, though no one's fault, that he was taught
by a priest. What can be more terrible than a system of untruth,
sincerely believed? For a priest teaches falsehoods, ignorant of the
truth, and thinks he does well; everything he does for the child is done
against the child, making crooked that which nature has made straight;
his teaching poisons the young mind with aged prejudices, drawing
evening twilight, like a curtain, over the dawn.

That ancient, solitary house and garden, formerly a convent and then the
home of his childhood, is still in his old age a dear and religious
memory, though its site is now profaned by a modern street He sees it in
a romantic atmosphere, in which, amid sunbeams and roses, his spirit
opened into flower. What a stillness was in its vast rooms and
cloisters. Only at long intervals was the silence broken by the return
of a plumed and sabred general, his father, from the wars. That child,
already thoughtful, was myself.

One night--it was some great festival of the empire, and all Paris was
illumined--my mother was walking in the garden with three of my father's
comrades, and I was following them, when we saw a tall figure in the
gloom of the trees. It was the proscribed Victor du Lahorie, my
godfather. He was even then conspiring against Bonaparte in the cause of
liberty, and was shortly after executed. I remember his saying, "If Rome
had kept her kings, she had not been Rome," and then, looking on me,
"Child, put liberty first of all!" That one word outweighed my whole
education.