Recollections of My Youth | Page 8

friendless, and at my
father's death my mother took me to his chapel and placed me under his
tutelary care. I cannot say that the good St. Yves managed our affairs
very successfully, or gave me a very clear understanding of my worldly
interests, but I nevertheless have much to thank him for, as he endowed
me with a spirit of content which passeth riches, and a native good
humour which has never left me.
The month of May, during which the festival of St. Yves fell, was one
long round of processions to the minihi, and as the different parishes,
preceded by their processional crucifixes, met in the roads, the
crucifixes were pressed one against the other in token of friendship.
Upon the eve of the festival the people assembled in the church, and on
the stroke of midnight the saint stretched out his arms to bless the
kneeling congregation. But if among them all there was one doubting
soul who raised his eyes to see if the miracle really did take place, the
saint, taking just offence at such a suspicion did not move, and by the
misconduct of this incredulous person, no benediction was given.

The clergy of the place, disinterested and honest to the core, contrived
to steer a middle course between not doing anything to weaken these
ideas and not compromising themselves. These worthy men were my
first spiritual guides, and I have them to thank for whatever may be
good in me. Their every word was my law, and I had so much respect
for them that I never thought to doubt anything they told me until I was
sixteen years of age, when I came to Paris. Since that time I have
studied under many teachers far more brilliant and learned, but none
have inspired such feelings of veneration, and this has often led to
differences of opinion between some of my friends and myself. It has
been my good fortune to know what absolute virtue is. I know what
faith is, and though I have since discovered how deep a fund of irony
there is in the most sacred of our illusions, yet the experience derived
from the days of old is very precious to me. I feel that in reality my
existence is still governed by a faith which I no longer possess, for one
of the peculiarities of faith is that its action does not cease with its
disappearance. Grace survives by mere force of habit the living
sensation of it which we have felt. In a mechanical kind of way we go
on doing what we had before been doing in spirit and in truth. After
Orpheus, when he had lost his ideal, was torn to pieces by the Thracian
women, his lyre still repeated Eurydice's name.
The point to which the priests attached the highest importance was
moral conduct, and their own spotless lives entitled them to be severe
in this respect, while their sermons made such an impression upon me
that during the whole of my youth I never once forgot their injunctions.
These sermons were so awe-inspiring, and many of the remarks which
they contained are so engraved upon my memory, that I cannot even
now recall them without a sort of tremor. For instance, the preacher
once referred to the case of Jonathan, who died for having eaten a little
honey. "_Gustans gustavi paululum mellis, et ecce morior_." I lost
myself in wonderment as to what this small quantity of honey could
have been which was so fatal in its effects. The preacher said nothing to
explain this, but heightened the effect of his mysterious allusion with
the words--pronounced in a very hollow and lugubrious tone--tetigisse
periisse. At other times the text would be the passage from Jeremiah,
"_Mors ascendit per fenestras_" This puzzled me still more, for what

could be this death which came up through the windows, these butterfly
wings which the lightest touch polluted? The preacher pronounced the
words with knitted brow and uplifted eyes. But what perplexed me
most of all was a passage in the life of some saintly person of the
seventeenth century who compared women to firearms which wound
from afar. This was quite beyond me, and I made all manner of guesses
as to how a woman could resemble a pistol. It seemed so inconsistent to
be told in one breath that a woman wounds from afar, and in another
that to touch her is perdition. All this was so incomprehensible that I
immersed myself in study, and so contrived to clear my brain of it.
Coming from persons in whom I felt unbounded confidence, these
absurdities carried conviction to my very soul, and even now, after fifty
years' hard experience of the world[1] the impression has not quite