I learnt much, too, from the course of lectures on history.  Abbe Richard[2] gave these lectures in the spirit of the modern school and with marked ability.  For some reason or other his lectures were interrupted, and his place was taken by a tutor, who with many other engagements on hand, merely read to us some old notes, interspersed with extracts from modern books.  Among these modern volumes, which often formed a striking contrast with the jog-trot old notes, there was one which produced a very singular effect upon me.  Whenever he began to read from it I was incapable of taking a single note, my whole being seeming to thrill with intoxicating harmony.  The book was Michelet’s Histoire de France, the passages which so affected me being in the fifth and sixth volumes.  Thus the modern age penetrated into me as through all the fissures of a cracked cement.  I had come to Paris with a complete moral training, but ignorant to the last degree.  I had everything to learn.  It was a great surprise for me when I found that there was such a person as a serious and learned layman.  I discovered that antiquity and the Church are not everything in this world, and especially that contemporary literature was well worthy of attention.  I ceased to look upon the death of Louis XIV. as marking the end of the world.  I became imbued with ideas and sentiments which had no expression in antiquity or in the seventeenth century.

So the germ which was in me began to sprout.  Distasteful as it was in many respects to my nature, this education had the effect of a chemical reagent, and stirred all the life and activity that was in me.  For the essential thing in education is not the doctrine taught, but the arousing of the faculties.  In proportion as the foundations of my religious faith had been shaken by finding the same names applied to things so different, so did my mind greedily swallow the new beverage prepared for it.  The world broke in upon me.  Despite its claim to be a refuge to which the stir of the outside world never penetrated, St. Nicholas was at this period the most brilliant and worldly house in Paris.  The atmosphere of Paris—­minus, let me add, its corruptions—­penetrated by door and window; Paris with its pettiness and its grandeur, its revolutionary force and its lapses into flabby indifference.  My old Brittany priests knew much more Latin and mathematics than my new masters; but they lived in the catacombs, bereft of light and air.  Here, the atmosphere of the age had free course.  In our walks to Gentilly of an evening we engaged in endless discussions.  I could never sleep of a night after that; my head was full of Hugo and Lamartine.  I understood what glory was after having vaguely expected to find it in the roof of the chapel at Treguier.  In the course of a short time a very great revelation was borne in upon me.  The words talent, brilliancy, and reputation, conveyed a meaning to me.  The modest, ideal which my earliest teachers had inculcated faded away; I had embarked upon a sea agitated by all the storms and currents of the age.  These currents and gales were bound to drive my vessel towards a coast whither my former friends would tremble to see me land.