Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone can teach you to read. And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which statement is a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or, in other words, the twelfth of May, 1869. I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the Place Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a dragon-fly. I was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to teach me, as the Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to be unearthed from the Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet. Blacquerie, the Viscount's tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had already called and taken the measurements for my new wardrobe. I can tell you I was elated; and no debutante ever looked forward more eagerly to the day of her debut than I to the twelfth of May. At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the salon by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these men, and I liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little as a rock imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected Père Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice, burnt heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell. As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose came running out, and, just as we drove off, popped into my hand a little green-covered book on the seven deadly sins. "What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves. I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window. "All that stuff you have learned," said this worthy man, "is excellent for children; but when we become men we put away childish things, as M. de Voltaire or some other scoundrel of a philosopher, I think it was, once remarked. Mark you, I say nothing against religion. Religion is a most excellent institution; but in the world, my dear Patrique, we are brought face to face with men. Religion is a fixed institution; and the nones, or complines, whatever you call it that they say to-day, were what they said two hundred years ago. But men are very shifty, and, as a matter of fact, damned rogues. It is very easy to be a saint in the College Bourdaloue; but it is very difficult to be a gentleman in the Boulevard des Italiens, especially in this bourgeois age" (he was a Royalist, with one foot in the Tuileries and the other in the Faubourg St. Germain), "when we have a what-do-you-call-it as President of the Council and a thingumbob on the throne of France."