My confirmation took place with the same pompous ceremonial. All the pupils, dressed in white, carried wax tapers. For the whole week I had refused to eat. I was pale and had grown thinner and my eyes looked larger from my perpetual transports, for I went to extremes in everything. Baron Larrey, who came with my mother to my confirmation, begged for me to have a month’s holiday to recruit, and this was accorded. Accordingly we started, my mother, Mme. Guérard, her son Ernest, my sister Jeanne and I, for Cauterets in the Pyrénées. The movement, the packing of the trunks, parcels, and packages, the railway, the diligence, the scenery, the crowds, and the general disturbance cured me and my nerves and my mysticism. I clapped my hands, laughed aloud, flung myself on mamma and nearly stifled her with kisses. I sang hymns at the top of my voice, I was hungry and thirsty, so I ate, drank, and in a word, lived. CHAPTER III A PRANK AND ITS RESULTS Cauterets at that time was not what it is now. It was an abominable but charming little hole of a place with plenty of verdure, very few houses, and a great many huts belonging to the mountain people. There were plenty of donkeys to be hired that took us up the mountains by extraordinary paths. I adore the sea and the plain, but I care neither for mountains nor for forests. Mountains seem to crush me, and forests to stifle me. I must, at any cost, have the horizon stretching out as far as the eye can see, and skies to dream about. I wanted to go up the mountains, so that they should lose their crushing effect. And consequently we went up always higher and higher. Mamma used to stay at home with her sweet friend Mme. Guérard. She used to read novels while Mme. Guérard embroidered. They would sit there together without speaking, each dreaming her own dream, seeing it fade away and beginning it over again. The old servant Marguerite was the only domestic mamma had brought with her, and she used to accompany us, and was always gay and daring. She always knew how to make the men laugh with speeches, the sense and crudeness of which I did not understand until much later. She was the life of the party always. As she had been with us from the time we were born, she was very familiar, and sometimes objectionably so. I would not let her have her own way with me, though, and I used to answer her back in the most cutting manner. She would take her revenge in the evening by giving us a dish of sweets for dinner that I did not like. I began to look better for the change, and although still very religious, my mysticism was growing calmer. As I could not exist, however, without a passion of some kind I began to get very fond of the goats, and I asked mamma quite seriously whether I might become a goat-herd. “I would rather you were that than a nun,” she replied, and then she added: “We will talk about it later on.”