What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral or
physical infirmity caused by mother's coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was a
reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first
neglect; as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not
discovered it. Far from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters
found amusement in making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which
children hide each other's peccadilloes, and which early teaches them
the principles of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that,
I was often punished for my brother's faults, without being allowed to
prove the injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in
children taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to
which I was subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother
whom they feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a
childish love of imitation; was it from a need of testing their
powers; or was it simply through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes
united to deprive me of the sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had
made me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling
hearts rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed
feelings turn to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth
from which, in after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many
characters the habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear,
and fear ends in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a
man, and makes him more or less a slave. But in my case these
perpetual tortures led to the development of a certain strength, which