"Together with this I remained taciturn, self-absorbed without expansion, without confidants. This work of mental exaltation was brought about obscurely but surely. The nerves of children are quickly excited; one ought to have regard to the fact that they live in a state of deep quiescence up to the time of their almost complete development. But does anyone reflect that, for certain students, an unjust imposition can be as great a pang as the death of a friend afterwards? Does anyone render an exact account to himself of the fact that certain young souls have with very little cause, terrible emotions, and are in a very short time diseased and incurable souls? "This was my case. This faculty of regret developed itself in me in such a fashion that my existence became a martyrdom. "I did not speak about it; I said nothing about it; but gradually I acquired a sensibility, or rather a sensitivity so lively that my soul resembled a living wound. Everything that touched it produced in it twitchings of pain, frightful vibrations, and consequently true ravages. Happy are the men whom nature has buttressed with indifference and armed with stoicism. "I reached my sixteenth year. An excessive timidity had come to me from this aptitude to suffer on account of everything. Feeling myself unprotected against all the attacks of chance or fate, I feared every contact, every approach, every event. I lived on the watch as if under the constant threat of an unknown and always expected misfortune. I did not feel enough of boldness either to speak or to act publicly. I had, indeed, the sensation that life is a battle, a dreadful conflict in which one receives terrible blows, grievous, mortal wounds. In place of cherishing, like all men, the hope of good-fortune on the morrow, I only kept a confused fear of it, and I felt in my own mind a desire to conceal myself to avoid that combat in which I would be vanquished and slain. "As soon as my studies were finished, they gave me six months' time to choose a career. A very simple event made me see clearly all of a sudden into myself, showed me the diseased condition of my mind, made me understand the danger, and caused me to make up my mind to fly from it. "Verdiers is a little town surrounded with plains and woods. In the central streets stands my parents' house. I now passed my days far from this dwelling which I had so much regretted, so much desired. Dreams were awakened in me, and I walked all alone in the fields in order to let them escape and fly away. My father and my mother, quite occupied with business, and anxious about my future, talked to me only about their profits or about my possible plans. They were fond of me in the way that hard-headed, practical people are; they had more reason than heart in their affection for me. I lived imprisoned in my thoughts, and trembling with my eternal uneasiness.