he Pyrenees, and when he was two
years old he had been transplanted to one of the industrial cities of
Artois. At the end of two years more came another removal to one of the
midland towns, and thus his tender childhood had been buffeted about,
from east to west, from north to south, taking root nowhere. All he could
remember of these early years was an unpleasant impression of hasty
packing and removal, of long journeys by diligence, and of uncomfortable
resettling. His mother had died just as he was entering upon his eighth
year; his father, absorbed in official work, and not caring to leave the
child to the management of servants, had placed him at that early age in
a college directed by priests. Julien thus passed his second term of
childhood, and his boyhood was spent behind these stern, gloomy walls,
bending resignedly under a discipline which, though gentle, was narrow
and suspicious, and allowed little scope for personal development. He
obtained only occasional glimpses of nature during the monotonous daily
walks across a flat, meaningless country. At very rare intervals, one of
his father's colleagues would take him visiting; but these stiff and
ceremonious calls only left a wearisome sensation of restraint and dull
fatigue. During the long vacation he used to rejoin his father, whom he
almost always found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there
for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting
scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among
strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless
satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and
submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible discipline
of the Church.

He was naturally inclined, by the tenderness of his nature, toward a
devotional life, and accepted with blind confidence the religious and
moral teaching of the reverend fathers. A doctrine which preached
separation from profane things; the attractions of a meditative and pious
life, and mistrust of the world and its perilous pleasures, harmonized
with the shy and melancholy timidity of his nature. Human beings,
especially women, inspired him with secret aversion, which was increased
by consciousness of his awkwardness and remissness whenever he found
himself in the society of women or young girls.

The beauties of nature did not affect him; the flowers in the springtime,
the glories of the summer s