He came every Thursday to spend the evening with the comtesse, and they were close friends, with the frank and honest friendship of old people.

She persisted: 

“Look here, M. le Cure! it is your turn now to make a confession!”

He repeated:  “I was not made for ordinary life.  I saw it fortunately in time, and I have had many proofs since that I made no mistake on the point: 

“My parents, who were mercers in Verdiers, and were quite well to do, had great ambitions for me.  They sent me to a boarding school while I was very young.  No one knows what a boy may suffer at school through the mere fact of separation, of isolation.  This monotonous life without affection is good for some, and detestable for others.  Young people are often more sensitive than one supposes, and by shutting them up thus too soon, far from those they love, we may develop to an exaggerated extent a sensitiveness which is overwrought and may become sickly and dangerous.

“I scarcely ever played; I had no companions; I passed my hours in homesickness; I spent the whole night weeping in my bed.  I sought to bring before my mind recollections of home, trifling memories of little things, little events.  I thought incessantly of all I had left behind there.  I became almost imperceptibly an over-sensitive youth to whom the slightest annoyances were terrible griefs.

“In this way I remained taciturn, self-absorbed, without expansion, without confidants.  This mental excitement was going on secretly and surely.  The nerves of children are quickly affected, and one should see to it that they live a tranquil life until they are almost fully developed.  But who ever reflects that, for certain boys, an unjust imposition may be as great a pang as the death of a friend in later years?  Who can explain why certain young temperaments are liable to terrible emotions for the slightest cause, and may eventually become morbid and incurable?

“This was my case.  This faculty of regret developed in me to such an extent that my existence became a martyrdom.

“I did not speak about it; I said nothing about it; but gradually I became so sensitive that my soul resembled an open wound.  Everything that affected me gave me painful twitchings, frightful shocks, and consequently impaired my health.  Happy are the men whom nature has buttressed with indifference and armed with stoicism.

“I reached my sixteenth year.  An excessive timidity had arisen from this abnormal sensitiveness.  Feeling myself unprotected from all the attacks of chance or fate, I feared every contact, every approach, every current.  I lived as though I were threatened by an unknown and always expected misfortune.  I did not venture either to speak or do anything in public.  I had, indeed, the feeling that life, is a battle, a dreadful conflict in which one receives terrible blows, grievous, mortal wounds.  In place of cherishing, like all men, a cheerful anticipation of the morrow, I had only a confused fear of it, and felt in my own mind a desire to conceal myself to avoid that combat in which I would be vanquished and slain.