he was as fat as Louis XVIII. and club-footed,--well, can you believe
it, my mother arrived in a post-chaise! Her glance arrested me; I
stood still, like a bird before a snake. What fate had brought her
there? The simplest thing in the world. Napoleon was then making his
last efforts. My father, who foresaw the return of the Bourbons, had
come to Paris with my mother to advise my brother, who was employed in
the imperial diplomatic service. My mother was to take me back with
her, out of the way of dangers which seemed, to those who followed the
march of events intelligently, to threaten the capital. In a few
minutes, as it were, I was taken out of Paris, at the very moment when
my life there was about to become fatal to me.

The tortures of imagination excited by repressed desires, the
weariness of a life depressed by constant privations had driven me to
study, just as men, weary of fate, confine themselves in a cloister.
To me, study had become a passion, which might even be fatal to my
health by imprisoning me at a period of life when young men ought to
yield to the bewitching activities of their springtide youth.

This slight sketch of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily
perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its
influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by
many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul,
filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly,
but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing
its final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in
mind, I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically
at its highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the
tortuous difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its
plains. A strange chance had held me long in that delightful period