f ripened age, the
twilight of the eternal night.

The young man full of illusions and dreams pursues his road without casting
a look backwards. What matters, indeed, the past to him? He expects nothing
but from the future. Proud at having escaped from infancy, at arriving at
the age of man, at flying on his wings, he pities the years when he was
small and weak, ignorant and credulous.

But when he has met with obstacles and ruts on that road which appeared to
him so wide and so fair, when he has torn his heart with the first briars
of life, when his thought has ripened beneath the sun of passions, and his
soul, stripped of its illusions, feels all chilly and bare amidst the ice
of reality, then he returns to the joys of infancy, he warms himself again
with the memory of his mother, and sits once again in the pleasant corner
of the family fire-side, on the little stool of his childhood.

Marcel saw himself again at the little seminary of Pont-a-Mousson, on the
benches, all blackened with ink, of the school-room, studying with ardour
the _Epitome_ or the _De Viris_ beneath the paternal eye of Father Martin,
a father aged 24, a deacon with curly hair, as timid as a maid. Then he ran
in the long corridors, or in the great square court lined with galleries
shaded by the chapel. He remembered his joy when he had slipped on some
excuse into the Seniors' garden: "Ah! there is little Marcel, come here,
you brat!" And everyone wished to give him a caress.

Then, the first time when he was called to the honour of serving the Mass.
He had thought of it a week beforehand, full of emotion and fear. At length
the day has come. He is dressed in the white surplice, wearing on his head
the red cap. He would have wished the whole world to see him; but the
pupils alone were present, and that diminished his happiness.

Father Barbelin, the censor, a severe but just man, officiated. He trembled
in every limb, as he responded the sacramental verses to this formidable
functionary. That was a great business; his little comrades called him in a
whisper from behind: Marcel! Marcel! and laughed and nudged each other,
while the elder ones, their nose in their book, with sanctimonious face and
ecstatic look were wrapt in God.

Then his success, his entrance to the great seminary at Nancy, his first
sermon in the chapel. His voice trembled at the commencement, but little by
little, growing stronger, taking courage, inspired by the sacred text, h