that large, old noiseless, gloomy house, I felt that I became more and
more isolated from the affections and the freedom of the world. My time
was divided between mutilated studies, without connection and without
object, and long hours of minute devotional exercises. I ask you, father,
did they ever seek to warm our young souls by words of tenderness or
evangelic love? Alas, no! For the words of the divine Saviour--Love ye
one another, they had substituted the command: Suspect ye one another.
Did they ever, father, speak to us of our country or of liberty?--No! ah,
no! for those words make the heart beat high; and with them, the heart
must not beat at all. To our long hours of study and devotion, there only
succeeded a few walks, three by three--never two and two--because by
threes, the spy-system is more practicable, and because intimacies are
more easily formed by two alone; and thus might have arisen some of those
generous friendships, which also make the heart beat more than it
should.15 And so, by the habitual repression of every feeling, there came
a time when I could not feel at all. For six months, I had not seen my
adopted mother and brother; they came to visit me at the college; a few
years before, I should have received them with transports and tears; this
time my eyes were dry, my heart was cold. My mother and brother quitted
me weeping. The sight of this grief struck me and I became conscious of
the icy insensibility which had been creeping upon me since I inhabited
this tomb. Frightened at myself, I wished to leave it, while I had still
strength to do so. Then, father, I spoke to you of the choice of a
profession; for sometimes, in waking moments, I seemed to catch from afar
the sound of an active and useful life, laborious and free, surrounded by
family affections. Oh! then I felt the want of movement and liberty, of
noble and warm emotions--of that life of the soul, which fled before me.
I told it you, father on my knees, bathing your hands with my tears. The
life of a workman or a soldier--anything would have suited me. It was
then you informed me, that my adopted mother, to whom I owed my life--for