when the soul awakes to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and
the savor of life is fresh. I stood in the period between puberty and
manhood,--the one prolonged by my excessive study, the other tardily
developing its living shoots. No young man was ever more thoroughly
prepared to feel and to love. To understand my history, let your mind
dwell on that pure time of youth when the mouth is innocent of
falsehood; when the glance of the eye is honest, though veiled by lids
which droop from timidity contradicting desire; when the soul bends
not to worldly Jesuitism, and the heart throbs as violently from
trepidation as from the generous impulses of young emotion.

I need say nothing of the journey I made with my mother from Paris to
Tours. The coldness of her behavior repressed me. At each relay I
tried to speak; but a look, a word from her frightened away the
speeches I had been meditating. At Orleans, where we had passed the
night, my mother complained of my silence. I threw myself at her feet
and clasped her knees; with tears I opened my heart. I tried to touch
hers by the eloquence of my hungry love in accents that might have
moved a stepmother. She replied that I was playing comedy. I
complained that she had abandoned me. She called me an unnatural
child. My whole nature was so wrung that at Blois I went upon the
bridge to drown myself in the Loire. The height of the parapet
prevented my suicide.

When I reached home, my two sisters, who did not know me, showed more
surprise than tenderness. Afterwards, however, they seemed, by
comparison, to be full of kindness towards me. I was given a room on
the third story. You will understand the extent of my hardships when I
tell you that my mother left me, a young man of twenty, without other
linen than my miserable school outfit, or any other outside clothes