I therefore told my mother that my religious vocation was not sufficiently strong. For the second time I changed my plans: I had refused to become a sailor, and now I was no longer willing to be a priest. There remained the military career, which I loved: but how to suffer the loss of my independence and the restraint of European discipline? I took an absurd idea into my head: I declared that I would go to Canada and clear forests, or to India and take service in the armies of the princes of that country. By one of those contrasts which we perceive in all men, my father, so reasonable in other respects, was never greatly shocked by an adventurous project. He chided my mother for my fickleness, but decided to ship me to India. I was dispatched to Saint-Malo, where an expedition was being fitted out for Pondicherry. * Two months elapsed: I found myself back and alone in my maternal island. Villeneuve had just died there. I went to weep for her beside the poor, empty bed on which she had breathed her last, and saw the little wicker go-cart in which I had learnt to stand upright upon this world of sorrows. I pictured my old nurse lying on her pillow and fixing her feeble gaze upon that basket on wheels: this first memorial of my life opposite the last memorial of the life of my second mother, the thought of the wishes for the happiness of her nursling which the kind Villeneuve addressed to Heaven on leaving this world, this proof of an attachment so constant, disinterested and pure broke my heart with tenderness, gratitude and regret. I found nothing else to remind me of my past at Saint-Malo: in the harbor I sought in vain for the ships in whose rigging I had played; they were gone or broken up; in the town, the house where I was born had been turned into an inn. I was scarce out of my cradle, and already a whole world had fallen into decay. I was a stranger in the parts of my childhood; people who met me asked who I was, for the sole reason that my head rose a few inches higher above the ground towards which it will sink again in a few years. How rapidly and how often we change our manner of existence and our illusions! Friends leave us, others take their place; our ties alter: there is always a time at which we possessed nothing of what we now possess, at which we have nothing of what we once had. Man has not one self-same life: he has several on end, and that is his calamity. *