So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white hands in their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she always carried with her. Then she added severely: “When you wish a book you may ask me for it.” I ask her for one of those books, but which one? I knew so well that she would refuse me all those which I had any desire to read! I have already shown too plainly that we did not think alike on any point. I complain of her having put a stop to my liveliest pleasure, less perhaps because of the prohibition than for the reason she gave. For she believed it to be her duty to repeat the phrases on the danger of romances, no doubt borrowed from some manual of piety, which appeared to me to express exactly the contrary to that which I had experienced. She made the danger I had run in this indiscriminate reading the pretext for occupying herself more closely with my studies and directing my education. This was her duty, but the contrast was too great between the ideas into which my father had precociously initiated me and the poverty of her mind, which was furnished with impressions positive, mean, and almost vulgar. I went to walk with her now, and she talked with me. Her conversation was confined to my bearing, my manners, my little comrades, and their parents. My intellect, which had been too early trained in the pleasure of thought, felt stifled and oppressed. The motionless landscape of extinct volcanoes recalled to me the grand convulsions of the terrestrial drama which my father formerly traced. The flowers which I plucked my mother would hold for a few minutes, and then let fall almost without looking at them. She was ignorant of their names, as she was of those of the insects which she compelled me to throw down as soon as I had picked them up, saying they were unclean and venomous. The roads among the vines no longer led to the discovery of the vast world to which the genial word of the dead had invited me. They were simply a continuation of the streets of the city and the misery of daily cares. I seek in vain for suitable words to express the vague and singular ennui of a mutilated mind, of a rarefied atmosphere which these walks inflicted on me. Language was created by men to express the ideas of men. The terms are lacking which correspond to the incomplete perceptions of children, to their penumbra of soul. How can I tell the suffering, which I did not myself comprehend, of a mind in which were fermenting high and broad conceptions, of a brain upon the border of the great intellectual horizon, and which had to submit to the unconscious tyranny of another brain, narrow and weak, a stranger to all general ideas, to every view either ample or profound?