At the door of the church, there used to sit, in front of a portable shop, a cake seller called Mother Girard, with whom I was well acquainted, for I had bought of her little bunches of cherries in the spring. This was the first fruit of the season that I might eat. This dainty, acid and fresh, was one of the sensualities of these days of childhood, and any one who had observed me, might have seen this frenzy of desire of which I have spoken. I was almost in a fever when on my way to this shop. This was not the only reason why I preferred the Church of the Capuchins with its extremely plain architecture, to the subterranean crypts of Notre-Dame-du-Port and to the vaults of the cathedral upheld by it elegant clustered columns. At the Capuchins the choir was closed. During the offices, invisible mouths behind the grating chanted the canticles, which strangely effected my childish imagination; they seemed to me to come from so far off, an abyss or a tomb. I looked at my mother praying beside me with the fervor which was shown in her smallest actions, and I thought that my father was not there, that he never came to church. My child’s brain was so puzzled by this absence, that, one day, I asked: “Why does not papa come to mass with us?” My inquiring child’s eyes had no trouble to see the embarrassment into which this question threw my mother. She withdrew from it, however, by an answer analogous to hundreds of others which a woman so essentially enamored of fixed principles and of obedience has since given me. “He goes to another mass, at an hour which suits him better, and then I have already told you that children ought never to ask why their parents do this or that.” All the difference of mind which separated my mother and myself is found in this sentence, uttered one cold morning in winter, while walking under the trees of Sablon Court. I can see her now in her pelerine, her hands in her muff lined with brown silk from which her book came halfway out, and the sincerity of her face even in her pious falsehood. I can see her eyes, which so many times since have regarded me with a look which did not comprehend me, and at this period she did not suspect that for my meditative childish nature to think, was already to ask, always and in relation to everything; why? Yes, why had my mother deceived me? For I knew that my father went to no kind of office. And why did he not go? While the grave and sad voices of the concealed monks were intoning the responses of the mass, I was absorbed in this question. I knew without being able to appreciate the reasons of the superiority that my father was accounted among the first of the city. How many times in walking were we stopped by some friend, who tapping me on the cheek would say: “Well, will we get to be a great savant like the father some day?”