“Dans ce Paris plein d’or et de misere,
        En l’an du Christ mil sept cent quatre-vingt,
        Chez un tailleur, mon pauvre et vieux grand-pere,
        Moi, nouveau-ne, sachais ce qui m’advint.”

     (In this Paris full of gold and misery,
     In the year of Christ one thousand seven hundred and eighty,
     At the house of a tailor, my grandfather poor and old,
     I, a new-born child, knew what happened to me.)

Authors of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries are more subjective in their writings than those of the seventeenth, whose characters can rarely be known from their works.  A glance at the life and surroundings of Beranger will show their influence on his genius.

Beranger’s mother was abandoned by her husband shortly after her marriage, and her child was born at the house of her father, the old tailor referred to in the song ‘The Tailor and the Fairy.’  She troubled herself little about the boy, and he was forsaken in his childhood.  Beranger tells us that he does not know how he learned to read.  In the beginning of the year 1789 he was sent to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and there, mounted on the roof of a house, he saw the capture of the Bastille on the 14th of July.  This event made a great impression on him, and may have laid the foundations of his republican principles.  When he was nine and a half his father sent him to one of his sisters, an innkeeper at Peronne, that town in the north of France famous for the interview in 1468 between Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, when the fox put himself in the power of the lion, as related so vividly in ‘Quentin Durward.’

Beranger’s aunt was very kind to him.  At Peronne he went to a free primary school founded by Ballue de Bellenglise, where the students governed themselves, electing their mayor, their judges, and their justices of the peace.  Beranger was president of a republican club of boys, and was called upon several times to address members of the Convention who passed through Peronne.  His aunt was an ardent republican, and he was deeply moved by the invasion of France in 1792.  He heard with delight of the capture of Toulon in 1793 and of Bonaparte’s exploits, conceiving a great admiration for the extraordinary man who was just beginning his military career.  At the age of fifteen Beranger returned to Paris, where his father had established a kind of banking house.  The boy had previously followed different trades, and had been for two years with a publishing house as a printer’s apprentice.  There he learned spelling and the rules of French prosody.  He began to write verse when he was twelve or thirteen, but he had a strange idea of prosody.  In order to get lines of the same length he wrote his words between two parallel lines traced from the top to the bottom of the page.  His system of versification seemed to be correct when applied to the Alexandrine verse of Racine; but when he saw the fables of La Fontaine, in which the lines are very irregular, he began to distrust his prosody.