precocious melancholy gave a sort of sentimental intuition.  My sisters were playing about and laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an accompaniment to my thoughts.  After a while the noise ceased and darkness fell.  My mother happened to notice my absence.  To escape blame, our governess, a terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, worked upon my mother’s fears,—­told her I had a horror of my home and would long ago have run away if she had not watched me; that I was not stupid but sullen; and that in all her experience of children she had never known one of so bad a disposition as mine.  She pretended to search for me.  I answered as soon as I was called, and she came to the fig-tree, where she very well knew I was.  “What are you doing there?” she asked.  “Watching a star.”  “You were not watching a star,” said my mother, who was listening on her balcony; “children of your age know nothing of astronomy.”  “Ah, madame,” cried Mademoiselle Caroline, “he has opened the faucet of the reservoir; the garden is inundated!” Then there was a general excitement.  The fact was that my sisters had amused themselves by turning the cock to see the water flow, but a sudden spurt wet them all over and frightened them so much that they ran away without closing it.  Accused and convicted of this piece of mischief and told that I lied when I denied it, I was severely punished.  Worse than all, I was jeered at for my pretended love of the stars and forbidden to stay in the garden after dark.

Such tyrannical restrains intensify a passion in the hearts of children even more than in those of men; children think of nothing but the forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly attractive to them.  I was often whipped for my star.  Unable to confide in my kind, I told it all my troubles in that delicious inward prattle with which we stammer our first ideas, just as once we stammered our first words.  At twelve years of age, long after I was at school, I still watched that star with indescribable delight,—­so deep and lasting are the impressions we receive in the dawn of life.

My brother Charles, five years older than I and as handsome a boy as he now is a man, was the favorite of my father, the idol of my mother, and consequently the sovereign of the house.  He was robust and well-made, and had a tutor.  I, puny and even sickly, was sent at five years of age as day pupil to a school in the town; taken in the morning and brought back at night by my father’s valet.  I was sent with a scanty lunch, while my school-fellows brought plenty of good food.  This trifling contrast between my privations and their prosperity made me suffer deeply.  The famous potted pork prepared at Tours and called “rillettes” and “rillons” was the chief feature of their mid-day meal, between the early breakfast and the parent’s dinner, which was ready when we returned from school.  This preparation of meat, much prized by certain gourmands, is seldom seen at Tours on aristocratic tables; if