Monsieur Rigard stupefied me with Greek and Latin, and that was all. Ah! how many children understood and guided properly, might have become great if they had not been permanently deformed by this frightful crushing of their brains by an imbecile father or an ignorant teacher. Is it all, then, to have lustfully begotten you on an evening of passion, and must not one continue the work of one's life forces by giving you intellectual nourishment as well, in order that it may strengthen your life and provide you with weapons to defend it. The truth was that my soul felt even lonelier with my father than with my teacher! Yet he did everything he could to please me. He consciously, though stupidly, strove to show his love for me. But when I was with him, he could never find anything to tell me outside of foolish, idle tales, bogey man stories, terrifying legends of the revolution of 1848 which had left in him an invincible fear, or else a tale of the brigandage of one Lebecq, a great republican who scandalized the country by his passionate opposition to the curé and his obduracy in refusing to hang red bunting on the walls on national holidays. Often he would take me along in his cabriolet, on his business trips in the country and, when perplexed as I was by the mystery of nature which every day unfolded itself around me, I asked him questions, he would not know how or what to answer and would dodge the answer thus: "You are too young to be told that! Wait till you grow up." And feeling miserable by the side of the large body of my father which swayed with the jolts of the road, I huddled up inside the cabriolet, while my father was killing with the stick of his whip the gad flies which swarmed on our mare's croup. Every now and then he would say: "I have never seen such pestering things; we'll have storm, that's sure."