I led a joyful life. My mother, too, seemed happy. Her chief occupation lay in nursing the sick, and her heaviest expense in providing them with broth and drugs; the latter were sent for to the druggist's at Bignan. I had never seen a doctor until I went to Lorient to enter school. Whenever she had a perplexing case, she called my father into consultation. As he had been a soldier, nothing surprised him. His method was to bleed. He one day undertook to vaccinate the entire population, and succeeded in doing so by offering five cents to all those who consented to honor him with their trust. This philanthropic operation must have made a great hole in the household budget. We had a library which contained fully twenty volumes. My sisters spent their time in taking them from my mother's room, and my mother in taking them from their hands. There were,--"Celina, or, The Child of Mystery and of Love;" "Alexis, or, The Wooden Cottage;" "The Helmet and the Square Cap, or, Both suited him." We also had, "The Evenings at the Château," by Madame de Genlis, "The Yellow Tales," and "Robinson Crusoe." I was of course not permitted to touch the novels. I was allowed "Robinson Crusoe," "The Yellow Tales," and "The Evenings at the Château," of which permission I availed myself eagerly, for I was ever a great reader. "Robinson Crusoe" particularly delighted me, and I read it three or four times a year. I had also a tender feeling for "Celina," which I only half understood. In the first place, it represented the forbidden fruit; and in the next place, it had pictures. I never got to the _dénouement_, because my mother, seeing that I was incorrigible, resolved to burn the _cuerpo del delito_. If I add that in rummaging through the closets and wardrobes I had found "L'Esprit des Lois" and an odd volume of the "Political and Philosophical History of the Two Indies," and that I read them, you will no doubt believe that I am trying to make myself out an infant prodigy. It was quite the reverse, for I preferred the Abbé Raynal to Montesquieu, and what I was most charmed with in the Abbé Raynal was some absurd rant about a mistress called Catchinka, whom he had lost, and who in some remarkable way formed a part of the Philosophical History of the Two Indies. This strange library produced a veritable chaos in my poor little brain, over which floated "Robinson." It was the genuine "Robinson" too,--a translation of the work of Daniel Defoe, which, as every one knows, contains as many sermons as it does events.