these expressions of voluptuous melancholy seemed to reveal to me my own nature. The volumes of Massillon[111] which contained the sermons on the _Pécheresse_ and the _Enfant prodigue_ never left my side. I was allowed to read them, for no one suspected what I found in them. I stole short candle-ends from the chapel to enable me at night to read those alluring descriptions of the disorders of the soul. I fell asleep stammering incoherent phrases, in which I strove to employ the sweetness, the rhythm, and the grace of the writer who has been most successful in transmitting to prose the euphony of Racinian verse. If, later, I have with some measure of truthfulness depicted the impulses which, mingled with Christian remorse, sway the heart, I am convinced that I owe this success to the chance which made me acquainted at the same moment with two hostile empires. The ravages made in my imagination by a bad book found their antidote in the terrors with which another book inspired me, and the latter were as it were allayed by the enervating thoughts drawn from pictures of the unveiled. Misfortunes are said never to come singly, and the same may be said of passions: they come together, like the Muses or the Furies. With the propensity which began to torture me, there was born in me the sense of honor, an exaltation of the soul which preserves the heart uncorrupted in the midst of corruption, a sort of restorative principle placed beside a devouring principle, as the inexhaustible source of the prodigies which love demands of youth and of the sacrifices which it imposes. When the weather was fine, the college boarders went out on Thursdays and Sundays. We were often taken to Mont Dol, on the top of which were some Gallo-Roman ruins: from the summit of this isolated eminence, the eye looks down on the sea and on marshes over which by night hovers the will o' the wisp, the wizard's light that burns in our lamps to this day. Another object of our walks was the fields in which stood a seminary of Eudists, after Eudes, brother of Mézeray the historian[112] and founder of their congregation. One day in May, the Abbé Égault, the prefect of the week, had taken us to this seminary. We were allowed full liberty in our games; only we were expressly forbidden to climb the trees. The master left us in a grassy lane, and walked away to say his breviary.