His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without having the means.  His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and thorough grisette, whom his father married for her beauty, and who left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a thought to her child.  The little Beranger, born with difficulty and only with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly cares.  He may be said never to have had a mother.  His Muse always showed traces of this privation of a mother’s smile.  The sentiment of home, of family, is not merely absent from his poems,—­it is sometimes shocked by them.

Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly.  He never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him.  Later in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it.  The truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt more painfully by Beranger than it would have been by almost any other person; for Beranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,—­a delicate poet, moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.

The pension in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the narrow means of his father.  He was taken away and sent to Peronne, in Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign of the Royal Sword.  It was while he was with this excellent person, who had a mind superior to her condition, that he began to form himself by the reading of good French authors.  His intelligence was not less aroused by the spectacle of the events which were passing under his eyes.  The Terror, the invasion by the armies of the Coalition, the roar of cannon, which could be heard at this frontier town, inspired him with a patriotism which was always predominant in him, and which at all decisive crises revived so strongly as even to silence and eclipse for the moment other cherished sentiments which were only less dear.

“This love of country,” said he, emphatically, “was the great, I should say the only, passion of my life.”  It was this love which was his best inspiration as poet,—­love of country, and with it of equality.  Out of devotion to these great objects of his worship, he will even consent that the statue of Liberty be sometimes veiled, when there is a necessity for it.  That France should be great and glorious, that she should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy more and more equitable and favorable to all,—­such were the aspirations and the programme of Beranger.