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