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26 What was my childhood? A long torpor. Separated from my mother whom I saw but rarely, avoiding my father whom I did not love at all, living almost in seclusion, a miserable orphan between old Marie and Felix in this grand lugubrious house, the silence and neglect of which weighed down upon me like a night of death—I was bored. Yes, I was that rare and wretched specimen of a child who is bored. Always sad and grave, hardly speaking at all, I had none of the inquisitiveness and mischievousness of my age, one might have said that my intellect had been slumbering forever in the numbness of maternal gestation. I am trying to recall, I am trying to bring to life again my feelings of childhood; verily I believe I had none. I was dragging on, all wasted and stultified, without knowing what to do with my legs, my arms, my eyes, my poor little body which annoyed me like a tiresome companion whom one wishes to get rid of. There is not one recollection, not one single impression that has been retained by me even in part. I always wished to be where I was not, and the toys exhaling the wholesome odor of fir trees were lying in heaps around me, without inducing me even to think of touching them. Never did I dream about a knife or wooden horse or picture book. Today, when I see little children running, jumping, chasing one another on the garden lawns, the sandy beaches, I recall with sadness the first mournful years of my life, and while listening to the clear laughter which sounds like the ringing of the angelus of human dawn, I say to myself that all my misfortunes have come from this childhood, lonely and lifeless, unbroken by a single bright event.

I was not quite twelve years old when my mother died. The day on which this misfortune happened the good curé Blanchetière, who liked us very much, pressed me to his breast, then he looked at me for