at all. Here, at the time of the First
Empire, the three boys played and worked, watched the clouds and trees
and listened to the birds, under the sweet influence of their mother's
smile.

It was the child's misfortune, though no one's fault, that he was taught
by a priest. What can be more terrible than a system of untruth,
sincerely believed? For a priest teaches falsehoods, ignorant of the
truth, and thinks he does well; everything he does for the child is done
against the child, making crooked that which nature has made straight;
his teaching poisons the young mind with aged prejudices, drawing
evening twilight, like a curtain, over the dawn.

That ancient, solitary house and garden, formerly a convent and then the
home of his childhood, is still in his old age a dear and religious
memory, though its site is now profaned by a modern street He sees it in
a romantic atmosphere, in which, amid sunbeams and roses, his spirit
opened into flower. What a stillness was in its vast rooms and
cloisters. Only at long intervals was the silence broken by the return
of a plumed and sabred general, his father, from the wars. That child,
already thoughtful, was myself.

One night--it was some great festival of the empire, and all Paris was
illumined--my mother was walking in the garden with three of my father's
comrades, and I was following them, when we saw a tall figure in the
gloom of the trees. It was the proscribed Victor du Lahorie, my
godfather. He was even then conspiring against Bonaparte in the cause of
liberty, and was shortly after executed. I remember his saying, "If Rome
had kept her kings, she had not been Rome," and then, looking on me,
"Child, put liberty first of all!" That one word outweighed my whole
education.

_III.--Before the Exile_

It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies
of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged,
not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished. The Republic lay
inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not
even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow
could prevent his espousal with the dead. On June 15 he made his protest
from the tribune, and from that day he fought relentless battle for
liberty and the republic. And on December 2, 1851, he received what he
had expected--twenty years of exile. That is the history of what has
been called his apostasy.

Throughout that stra