the false gods goes to the altar decked with flowers. The significance
of that custom has always deeply touched me. A sacrifice is nothing
without grace. My life is simple and without the very slightest
romance. My father, who has made his own way in the world, is a stern,
inflexible man; he treats his wife and his children as he treats
himself. I have never seen a smile upon his lips. His iron hand, his
stern face, his gloomy, rough activity, oppressed us all--wife,
children, clerks and servants--under an almost savage despotism. I
could--I speak for myself only--I could have accommodated myself to
this life if the power thus exercised had had an equal repression;
but, captious and vacillating, he treated us all with intolerable
alternations. We were always ignorant whether we were doing right or
whether he considered us to blame; and the horrible expectancy which
results from that is torture in domestic life. A street life seems
better than a home under such circumstances. Had I been alone in the
house I would have borne all from my father without murmuring; but my
heart was torn by the bitter, unceasing anguish of my dear mother,
whom I ardently loved and whose tears put me sometimes into a fury in
which I nearly lost my reason. My school days, when boys are usually
so full of misery and hard work, were to me a golden period. I dreaded
holidays. My mother herself preferred to come and see me. When I had
finished my philosophical course and was forced to return home and
become my father's clerk, I could not endure it more than a few
months; my mind, bewildered by the fever of adolescence, threatened to
give way. On a sad autumn evening as I was walking alone with my
mother along the Boulevard Bourdon, then one of the most melancholy
parts of Paris, I poured my heart into hers, and I told her that I saw
no possible life before me except in the Church. My tastes, my ideas,
all that I most loved would be continually thwarted so long as my
father lived. Under the cassock of a priest he would be forced to