There I remained eight years without seeing my family; living the life of a pariah,—­partly for the following reason.  I received but three francs a month pocket-money, a sum barely sufficient to buy the pens, ink, paper, knives, and rules which we were forced to supply ourselves.  Unable to buy stilts or skipping-ropes, or any of the things that were used in the playground, I was driven out of the games; to gain admission on suffrage I should have had to toady the rich and flatter the strong of my division.  My heart rose against either of these meannesses, which, however, most children readily employ.  I lived under a tree, lost in dejected thought, or reading the books distributed to us monthly by the librarian.  How many griefs were in the shadow of that solitude; what genuine anguish filled my neglected life!  Imagine what my sore heart felt when, at the first distribution of prizes,—­of which I obtained the two most valued, namely, for theme and for translation,—­neither my father nor my mother was present in the theatre when I came forward to receive the awards amid general acclamations, although the building was filled with the relatives of all my comrades.  Instead of kissing the distributor, according to custom, I burst into tears and threw myself on his breast.  That night I burned my crowns in the stove.  The parents of the other boys were in town for a whole week preceding the distribution of the prizes, and my comrades departed joyfully the next day; while I, whose father and mother were only a few miles distant, remained at the school with the “outremers,”—­a name given to scholars whose families were in the colonies or in foreign countries.

You will notice throughout how my unhappiness increased in proportion as the social spheres on which I entered widened.  God knows what efforts I made to weaken the decree which condemned me to live within myself!  What hopes, long cherished with eagerness of soul, were doomed to perish in a day!  To persuade my parents to come and see me, I wrote them letters full of feeling, too emphatically worded, it may be; but surely such letters ought not to have drawn upon me my mother’s reprimand, coupled with ironical reproaches for my style.  Not discouraged even then, I implored the help of my sisters, to whom I always wrote on their birthdays and fete-days with the persistence of a neglected child; but it was all in vain.  As the day for the distribution of prizes approached I redoubled my entreaties, and told of my expected triumphs.  Misled by my parents’ silence, I expected them with a beating heart.  I told my schoolfellows they were coming; and then, when the old porter’s step sounded in the corridors as he called my happy comrades one by one to receive their friends, I was sick with expectation.  Never did that old man call my name!