Honore was impulsive, with a heart overflowing with affection, but the
training he received at home was rigorous and severe. Entrusted to the
hands of servants, under the high and mighty surveillance of his
governess, Mlle. Delahaye, he received from his father, who was already
an old man, nothing more than an indulgent and often absent-minded
affection, while, as for his mother, she carried out with great
firmness her theories regarding the relation between children and
parents. She received hers each evening in her large drawing room with
cold dignity. Before kissing them she recapitulated all the faults they
had committed during the day, which she had learned from the governess,
and her reproofs were reinforced with punishments. Honore never
approached her without fear, repressing all his feelings and his need
of affection. He suffered in secret. Then he would take refuge with his
sister Laure, his only friend and comforter.

Before he was five years old he was sent to a day-school in Tours known
as the Leguay Institution. He had a taste for reading, indeed it was
more than a taste, it was a sort of mental starvation which made him
throw himself hungrily upon every book he encountered. Otherwise,
Honore was frankly a mediocre and negligent. But concentrated in
himself and deprived of the caresses which would have meant so much to
him, he created a whole world out of his readings and sometimes gave
glimpses of it to Laure by acting out before her dramas and comedies of
his own manufacture and of which he was the hero. His exuberance made
him a good comrade; yet he also loved solitude. When alone, he could
give himself up to the fantasies born of his own imagination, and he
invented his own games and used to play upon a cheap toy violin made of
red wood airs which he enjoyed to the point of ecstasy and of which no
one else could bear the sound.