me.  “I shall make books.”  “You mean that you will be a bookseller.”  “Oh, no,” I replied, “I mean to make books—­to compose them.”  These dawning dispositions needed time and favourable circumstances to be developed, and what was so completely lacking in all my surroundings was ability.  My worthy tutors were not endowed with any seductive qualities.  With their unswerving moral solidity, they were the very contrary of the southerners—­of the Neapolitan, for instance, who is all glitter and clatter.  Ideas did not ring within their minds with the sonorous clash of crossing swords.  Their head was like what a Chinese cap without bells would be; you might shake it, but it would not jingle.  That which constitutes the essence of talent, the desire to show off one’s thoughts to the best advantage, would have seemed to them sheer frivolity, like women’s love of dress, which they denounced as a positive sin.  This excessive abnegation of self, this too ready disposition to repulse what the world at large likes by an Abrenuntio tibi, Satana, is fatal to literature.  It will be said, perhaps, that literature necessarily implies more or less of sin.  If the Gascon tendency to elude many difficulties with a joke, which I derived from my mother, had always been dormant in me, my spiritual welfare would perhaps have been assured.  In any event, if I had remained in Brittany I should never have known anything of the vanity which the public has liked and encouraged—­that of attaining a certain amount of art in the arrangement of words and ideas.  Had I lived in Brittany I should have written like Rollin.  When I came to Paris I had no sooner given people a taste of what few qualities I possessed than they took a liking for them, and so—­to my disadvantage it may be—­I was tempted to go on.

I will at some future time describe how it came to pass that special circumstances brought about this change, which I underwent without being at heart in the least inconsistent with my past.  I had formed such a serious idea of religious belief and duty that it was impossible for me, when once my faith faded, to wear the mask which sits so lightly upon many others.  But the impress remained, and though I was not a priest by profession I was so in disposition.  All my failings sprung from that.  My first masters taught me to despise laymen, and inculcated the idea that the man who has not a mission in life is the scum of the earth.  Thus it is that I have had a strong and unfair bias against the commercial classes.  Upon the other hand, I am very fond of the people, and especially of the poor.  I am the only man of my time who has understood the characters of Jesus and of Francis of Assisi.  There was a danger of my thus becoming a democrat like Lamennais.  But Lamennais merely exchanged one creed for another, and it was not until the close of his life that he acquired the cool temper necessary to the critic, whereas the same process which weaned me from Christianity made me impervious to any other practical enthusiasm.  It was the very philosophy of knowledge which, in my revolt against scholasticism, underwent such a profound modification.