Mademoiselle Pivert--I make her read the _Thousand and One Nights_, or, rather, one story in that collection--Old Hiraux, my music-master--The little worries of his life--He takes his revenge on his persecutors after the fashion of the Maréchal de Montluc--He is condemned to be flogged, and nearly loses the sight of his eyes--What happened on Easter Day in the organ-loft at the monastery--He becomes a grocer's lad--His vocation leads him to the study of music--I have little aptitude for the violin. I had learnt to read at a very early age, as I have said, thanks to Madame Darcourt's Buffon, M. Collard's Bible and, above all, to my mother's kindly pains. My sister too, who was at a boarding-school in Paris, during her six weeks' vacations, which were spent with us, completed my early education by teaching me to write. So at five or six years of age I was very well up in these two accomplishments, and extraordinarily conceited about them. I can still see myself, about the height of a jack-boot, in a little cotton jacket (for, like the Romans, I did not leave off the _toga praetexta_ till I was fifteen),--I can still see myself, pedantically joining in the conversation of grown-up people, contributing items of sacred or profane learning which I had derived from the Bible or mythology, theories of natural history cribbed from M. de Buffon and M. Daudin, geographical information borrowed from _Robinson Crusoe_, and social and political ideas culled from the sage Idomeneus, founder of Salentum. But mythology was my strong point. Besides the _Lettres à Emilie sur la Mythologie_ of my compatriot Demoustier, which I knew by heart, I possessed a _Mythologie de la Jeunesse_, illustrated with pictures and interspersed with verses from Racine and Saint-Ange, which I was everlastingly devouring. Not a god or goddess or demi-god, not a single faun or dryad, not a hero was there whose attributes I did not know. Hercules and his twelve labours, Jupiter and his twenty transformations, Vulcan and his thirty-six misfortunes, I knew them all at my fingers' ends, and, what is still more extraordinary, I know them still. One day (it was at M. Deviolaine's house, in 1809, at a time when each morning's paper contained bulletins of deeds which, for ten years, made our history seem like one of the heroic fables of old) I remember some of the guests asked, just after luncheon, what the news of the day was; but as it was still early no one had read the papers, and consequently no one could satisfy the general curiosity. M. Deviolaine rang the bell, and the servant appeared. "Mas," he said (the name of the servant), "get a _Gazette_ and bring it us." "Oh! there is no need for that, cousin," I said, crossing my hands behind my back; "I have read the paper and there is nothing of importance in it--only a sitting of the _Corps Législatif._"