Is it suggested that the manner of my bringing-up might have led me to abhor the authors of my being? Not at all: the remembrance of their sternness is almost pleasant to me; I value and honour their great good qualities. When my father died, my comrades in the Navarre Regiment witnessed my regret. From my mother I derive the consolation of my life, since it was she who taught me my religion; I gathered the Christian verities that issued from her mouth, as Pierre de Langres studied at night in church, by the light of the lamp burning before the Blessed Sacrament. Would my intelligence have received a greater development had I been set earlier to my studies? I doubt it: the waves, the winds, the solitude which were my first masters were probably better suited to my native disposition; possibly I owe to those wild tutors virtues which might have remained unknown to me. The truth is that no system of education is in itself to be preferred to any other system: do children love their parents better nowadays when they say _tu_ and _toi_ to them and no longer fear them? Gesril was spoilt in the same house in which I was scolded: we have both been honest men and loving and respectful sons. This thing which you think bad brings out your child's gifts; that other which you think good would stifle those same gifts. What God does is well done: it is Providence that guides us, when it destines us to play a part upon the world's stage. [1] This book was written at the Vallée-aux-Loups between October 1811 and June 1812.--T. [2] Seven miles south of Paris, in the Department of Seine.--T. [3] HORACE, _Od._ I. XI--T. [4] Voltaire was not born on the 20th of February 1694, and he was not born at Châtenay. In 1864, M. A. Jal (_Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire_, pp. 1283, _et seq._), after searching the register of the Parish of Saint-André-des-Arcs, established the fact that Voltaire was born in Paris on Sunday, 21 November 1694.--B. [5] The district now known as Florida was formerly divided into Eastern and Western Florida, with St. Augustine and Pensacola for their respective capitals.--T. [6] The 4th of October is the feast of St François of Assisi--T. [7] Chateaubriand made his entrance into Jerusalem on the 4th of October 1806.--B. [8] Following M. Edmond Biré in his edition of 1899, I have borrowed this paragraph from the manuscript known as the _Manuscrit_ de 1826, which was in the handwriting, for the most part, of Madame Récamier, and which was published by Madame Charles Lenormant in 1874. It is certainly preferable to the paragraph in all other editions of the _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, which runs as follows: "My father's birth and the trials of his first position caused his character to become one of the gloomiest ever known. Now this character influenced my ideas because it terrified me in childhood, saddened me in youth, and determined the manner of my education."