ntment to me, as
to all my boyish ambitions and hopes, than the routine of my daily
life at this period. I was lodged, with some fourteen others, in an old
Pension in the Rue des Augustines, adjoining the bureau in which we were
employed. We repaired each morning at an early hour to our office, and
never left it till late in the evening,--sometimes, indeed, to a late
hour of the night. Neither the manners nor the habits of my companions
inspired me with a desire to cultivate their intimacy. They were
evidently of a low class by birth, and with tastes even inferior to
their position. They construed my estrangement to the true cause, and
did not scruple to show that I was not a favorite amongst them. In
ridicule of my seeming pretensions, they called me the "Count," and
never passed me without an obsequious mock salutation, which I returned
as punctiliously, and not appearing to detect its sarcasm. With
experience of life and mankind, isolation is probably a condition
not devoid of certain pleasures,--it may minister to a kind of proud
self-reliance and independence of spirit; but to a boy it is one of
unalloyed misery. There is no heavier infliction than the want of that
free expansion of the heart that comes of early friendship. Youth is
essentially the season of confidence; and to restrain its warm impulses,
and dam up the flow of its affections, is to destroy its best and
highest charm. I will not venture to assert that I was not myself much
to blame for the seclusion in which I lived. I probably resented too
forcibly what I need scarcely have noticed, and felt too acutely what,
at worst, were but trifling annoyances. Some of this may be attributed
to me constitutionally, but even more to the nature of my bringing
up. All my boyish impulses were stimulated by affection; whatever I
attempted was in a wish to gain praise; all my ambitions were to be
loved the more. In my loneliness I sought out M. de Gabriac, but in
vain. His lodging on the Place was now occupied by another, who could
give no tidings of him whatever. I wrote to my mother and to Raper,
but without receiving a reply. I then tried M. Jost, and received a
few lines to say that my friends had taken their departure some months
before from Reichenau, but in what direction he knew not. This letter
put the finishing stroke to my sense of utter desolation. It was indeed
not possible to conceive a more forlorn and friendless being than I now
was. By my superior in