Honore held back his tears, profoundly hurt at this blow to his dreams
and his creative pride; but he retained a confused sense of injustice
and a conviction of the superior quality of his work.

He had now been at the Vendome school for more than six years, and had
given himself up to a prodigious amount of work, the extent of which no
one even suspected. He had grown thin and pallid and half dazed,
intoxicated with the ideas which whirled within his brain without
system or order. He seemed to be attacked by some grave malady, the
cause of which could not be explained. The director of the school, M.
Mareschal Duplessis, became anxious and wrote to the boy's parents to
come and take him out of school. They came post-haste. Honore was
apparently in a somnambulistic state, hardly answering the questions
put to him; his features were drawn and haggard, for he had been
carrying too heavy a burden of readings, feelings and thoughts. His
family could no more understand than his masters did the origin of his
strange disorder. And Mme. Sallambier, who had come to live with her
daughter at Tours, after the death of her husband in 1804, summed up
the opinion of the family:

"That is the state in which the schools give us back the fine children
that we send them!"



Chapter 2.

The Garret.