What immense labor is gone through by them in a few months!  To notice noises, classify them, understand that some of these sounds are words, and that these words are thoughts; to find out of themselves alone the meaning of everything, and distinguish the true from the false, the real from the imaginary; to correct, by observation, the errors of their too ardent imagination; to unravel a chaos, and during this gigantic task to render the tongue supple and strengthen the staggering little legs, in short, to become a man.  If ever there was a curious and touching sight it is that of this little creature setting out upon the conquest of the world.  As yet he knows neither doubt nor fear, and opens his heart fully.  There is something of Don Quixote about a baby.  He is as comic as the Knight, but he has also a sublime side.

Do not laugh too much at the hesitations, the countless gropings, the preposterous follies of this virgin mind, which a butterfly lifts to the clouds, to which grains of sand are mountains, which understands the twittering of birds, ascribes thoughts to flowers, and souls to dolls, which believes in far-off realms, where the trees are sugar, the fields chocolate, and the rivers syrup, for which Punch and Mother Hubbard are real and powerful individuals, a mind which peoples silence and vivifies night.  Do not laugh at his love; his life is a dream, and his mistakes poetry.

This touching poetry which you find in the infancy of man you also find in the infancy of nations.  It is the same.  In both cases there is the same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the unknown.  And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother Hubbard and Venus, there is only a hair’s breadth.

CHAPTER XXIX

HIS FIRST BREECHES

The great desire in a child is to become a man.  But the first symptom of virility, the first serious step taken in life, is marked by the assumption of breeches.

This first breeching is an event that papa desires and mamma dreads.  It seems to the mother that it is the beginning of her being forsaken.  She looks with tearful eyes at the petticoat laid aside for ever, and murmurs to herself, “Infancy is over then?  My part will soon become a small one.  He will have fresh tastes, new wishes; he is no longer only myself, his personality is asserting itself; he is some ones boy.”

The father, on the contrary, is delighted.  He laughs in his moustache to see the little arching calves peeping out beneath the trousers; he feels the little body, the outline of which can be clearly made out under the new garment, and says to himself; “How well he is put together, the rascal.  He will have broad shoulders and strong loins like myself.  How firmly his little feet tread the ground.”  Papa would like to see him in jackboots; for a trifle he would buy him spurs.  He begins to see himself in this little one sprung from him; he looks at him in a fresh light, and, for the first time, he finds a great charm in calling him “my boy.”