y and frivolous. The world discovered
itself to me as mean and deficient in virtue. I seemed to have lost
caste, and to have fallen upon a nest of pigmies.

My sorrow was much increased by the grief which I had been compelled
to inflict upon my mother. I resorted, perhaps wrongly, to certain
artifices with the view, as I hoped, of sparing her pain. Her letters
went to my heart. She supposed my position to be even more painful
than it was in reality, and as she had, despite our poverty, rather
spoilt me, she thought that I should never be able to withstand any
hardship. "When I remember how a poor little mouse kept you from
sleeping, I am at a loss to know how you will get on," she wrote to
me. She passed her time singing the Marseilles hymns,[1] of which she
was so fond, especially the hymn of Joseph, beginning--

"O Joseph, o mon aimable
Fils affable."

When she wrote to me in this strain, my heart was fit to break. As a
child, I was in the habit of asking her ten times over in the course
of the day--"Mother, have I been good?" The idea of a rupture between
us was most cruel. I accordingly resorted to various devices in order
to prove to her that I was still the same tender son that I had been
in the past. In time the wound healed, and when she saw that I was as
tender and loving towards her as ever, she readily agreed that there
might be more than one way of being a priest, and that nothing was
changed in me except the dress, which was the literal truth.

My ignorance of the world was thorough-paced. I knew nothing except
of literary matters, and as my only real knowledge was that which I
gained at St. Sulpice, I have always been like a child in all worldly
matters. I did not therefore make any effort to render my material
position as good as the circumstances admitted. The one object of life
seemed to me to be thought. The educational profession being the one
which comes nearest to the clerical one, I selected it almost without
reflection. It was hard, no doubt, after having reached the maximum
of intellectual culture, and having held a post of some honour,
to descend to the lowest rank. I was better versed than any living
Frenchman, with the exception of M. Le Hir, in the comparative theory
of the Semitic languages, and my position was no better than that of
an under-master; I was a savant, and I had not taken a degree. But
the inward contentment of my own conscience was enough for me. I
never felt a shadow