To all these my early impressions I owe my deep respect for all holy things, my deep faith in Providence and my great love of God. Never, throughout my long life, have I had one moment of despair, one minute of doubt, not even in the darkest hours of life; I dare not say I am certain of the immortality of my soul, but I can go as far as to say I hope in it. I believe that death is a forgetting of the past without being a renunciation of the future. If science succeeds in endowing spirits with memory it will have solved the great mystery, of which God has hitherto kept the key; souls will then remember, and immortality be laid bare to us. But to conclude. In the midst of these walks and games and early schooling, I was growing up, I could play the _Marche des Samnites_ and the Overture to _Lodoïska_, upon my violin, and Hiraux, with his black cap pulled down over his ears, was confessing to my mother that he was too honest to steal from her any longer the ten francs per month which she gave him to make a musician of me. I was very ready to give up these lessons, and I should have done so long before, had my attraction for Hiraux not surmounted my dislike of the solfeggio. I renounced them, too, the more eagerly as I had now begun taking lessons far more seductive to my mind--namely, lessons in fencing. The Republic had turned the fine castle and ancient pleasure-house of the dukes of Orléans into barracks, and the Empire into a workhouse. Here I had discovered an old fencing master. He had been injured once when giving a lesson without a mask: the foil of one of his pupils had pierced his mouth and destroyed his uvula. This accident, by making him almost dumb, or rather by reducing him to an almost unintelligible gibberer, had made teaching almost an impossibility--this accident, I say, together with a great love for the bottle, had brought our old St. Georges to the royal dwelling-place of François I., then an auxiliary to the Workhouse of the Seine. This man was called old Mounier, and, though I must ask pardon of my later master Grisier, I beg to state I received my first lessons in fencing from Mounier when I was ten years old. For I was about ten years old when I began to show such disinclination towards music and such intense enthusiasm for physical exercises. While all this was going on, and while I was dreaming of nothing but swords and sabres, pistols and guns, I remained very cowardly on one single point. Like nature, I abhorred a vacuum. So soon as I felt myself suspended a certain distance above the earth, like Antæus, my head began to whirl, and I lost all my wits. I dared not even go down steps if they were somewhat steep, and I had never ventured to climb trees after birds' nests with my young playfellows.