cities of Artois. At the end of two years more came another removal to
one of the midland towns, and thus his tender childhood had been buffeted
about, from east to west, from north to south, taking root nowhere.
All he could remember of these early years was an unpleasant impression
of hasty packing and removal, of long journeys by diligence, and of
uncomfortable resettling. His mother had died just as he was entering
upon his eighth year; his father, absorbed in official work, and not
caring to leave the child to the management of servants, had placed him
at that early age in a college directed by priests. Julien thus passed
his second term of childhood, and his boyhood was spent behind these
stern, gloomy walls, bending resignedly under a discipline which, though
gentle, was narrow and suspicious, and allowed little scope for personal
development. He obtained only occasional glimpses of nature during the
monotonous daily walks across a flat, meaningless country. At very rare
intervals, one of his father's colleagues would take him visiting; but
these stiff and ceremonious calls only left a wearisome sensation of
restraint and dull fatigue. During the long vacation he used to rejoin
his father, whom he almost always found in a new residence. The poor man
had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these
continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a
stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though
joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire
college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible
discipline of the Church.

He was naturally inclined, by the tenderness of his nature, toward a
devotional life, and accepted with blind confidence the religious and
moral teaching of the reverend fathers. A doctrine which preached
separation from profane things; the attractions of a meditative and pious
life, and mistrust of the world and its perilous pleasures, harmonized