One day, when I accused myself to my confessor of having cursed my life, he pointed to the skies, where grew, he said, the promised palm for the “Beati qui lugent” of the Saviour.  From the period of my first communion I flung myself into the mysterious depths of prayer, attracted to religious ideas whose moral fairyland so fascinates young spirits.  Burning with ardent faith, I prayed to God to renew in my behalf the miracles I had read of in martyrology.  At five years of age I fled to my star; at twelve I took refuge in the sanctuary.  My ecstasy brought dreams unspeakable, which fed my imagination, fostered my susceptibilities, and strengthened my thinking powers.  I have often attributed those sublime visions to the guardian angel charged with moulding my spirit to its divine destiny; they endowed my soul with the faculty of seeing the inner soul of things; they prepared my heart for the magic craft which makes a man a poet when the fatal power is his to compare what he feels within him with reality,—­the great things aimed for with the small things gained.  Those visions wrote upon my brain a book in which I read that which I must voice; they laid upon my lips the coal of utterance.

My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the Oratorian teachings, took me from Pont-le-Voy, and sent me to Paris to an institution in the Marais.  I was then fifteen.  When examined as to my capacity, I, who was in the rhetoric class at Pont-le-Voy, was pronounced worthy of the third class.  The sufferings I had endured in my family and in school were continued under another form during my stay at the Lepitre Academy.  My father gave me no money; I was to be fed, clothed, and stuffed with Latin and Greek, for a sum agreed on.  During my school life I came in contact with over a thousand comrades; but I never met with such an instance of neglect and indifference as mine.  Monsieur Lepitre, who was fanatically attached to the Bourbons, had had relations with my father at the time when all devoted royalists were endeavoring to bring about the escape of Marie Antoinette from the Temple.  They had lately renewed acquaintance; and Monsieur Lepitre thought himself obliged to repair my father’s oversight, and to give me a small sum monthly.  But not being authorized to do so, the amount was small indeed.

The Lepitre establishment was in the old Joyeuse mansion where, as in all seignorial houses, there was a porter’s lodge.  During a recess, which preceded the hour when the man-of-all-work took us to the Charlemagne Lyceum, the well-to-do pupils used to breakfast with the porter, named Doisy.  Monsieur Lepitre was either ignorant of the fact or he connived at this arrangement with Doisy, a regular smuggler whom it was the pupils’ interest to protect,—­he being the secret guardian of their pranks, the safe confidant of their late returns and their intermediary for obtaining forbidden books.  Breakfast on a cup of “cafe-au-lait” is an aristocratic