sacrifices they had made to educate him with such a want of proper
feeling. Yet Honore persisted in his attitude of revolt, Honore, who
throughout his childhood and youth had hitherto always submitted
docilely to all the rules and commands of the family. "No, I will not
be a notary,--I wish to become an author,--a celebrated author." They
laughed at him. What promise of talent had he ever given to justify
such absurd pretensions? Was it those wretched scribblings which had
formerly caused so much merriment that now inspired him with such
pride? Very well! he must simply get over it. His little absurdities
were all very funny, when he was at the age of frivolity and nonsense,
but now that he had come to years of discretion, it was time he learned
that life was not play: "So, my boy, you will be a notary." "No,"
repeats Honore, "I shall not." His black eyes flash, his thick lips
tremble, and he pleads his cause before the family tribunal, the cause
of his genius which no one else has recognised and which he himself
perceives only confusedly within him.

"From childhood I looked upon myself as foreordained to be a great
man," he wrote in The Magic Skin, "I struck my brow like Andre Chenier,
'There is something inside there!' I seemed to feel within me a thought
to be expressed, a system to be established, a science to be expounded.
I often thought of myself as a general, or an emperor. Sometimes I was
Byron, and then again I was nothing. After having sported upon the
pinnacle of human affairs, I discovered that all the mountains, all the
real difficulties still remained to be surmounted. The measureless
self-esteem which seethed within me, the sublime belief in destiny,
which perhaps evolves into genius if a man does not allow his soul to
be torn to tatters by contact with business interests, as easily as a
sheep leaves its wool on the thorns of the thicket through which it
passes,--all this was my salvation. I wished only to work in silence, to