The Lily of the Valley | Page 2

join in the persecutions to which I was
subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother whom they
feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a childish love of
imitation; was it from a need of testing their powers; or was it simply
through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes united to deprive me of the
sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had made
me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling hearts
rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed feelings turn to
hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth from which, in
after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many characters the
habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear, and fear ends in
submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a man, and makes
him more or less a slave. But in my case these perpetual tortures led to
the development of a certain strength, which increased through exercise
and predisposed my spirit to the habit of moral resistance. Always in
expectation of some new grief--as the martyrs expected some fresh
blow--my whole being expressed, I doubt not, a sullen resignation
which smothered the grace and gaiety of childhood, and gave me an
appearance of idiocy which seemed to justify my mother's threatening
prophecies. The certainty of injustice prematurely roused my
pride--that fruit of reason--and thus, no doubt, checked the evil
tendencies which an education like mine encouraged.
Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her
solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed
desirous of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such
times when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would
inflict upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced that
I could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and watch
the insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. Though my loneliness
naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation was first
aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my early troubles.
So little notice was taken of me that the governess occasionally forgot
to send me to bed. One evening I was peacefully crouching under a
fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of curiosity which takes
possession of a child's mind, and to which my precocious melancholy
gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters were playing about and
laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an accompaniment to my
thoughts. After a while the noise ceased and darkness fell. My mother
happened to notice my absence. To escape blame, our governess, a
terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, worked upon my mother's fears,--told
her I had a horror of my home and would long ago have run away if she

had not watched me; that I was not stupid but sullen; and that in all her
experience of children she had never known one of so bad a disposition
as mine. She pretended to search for me. I answered as soon as I was
called, and she came to the fig-tree, where she very well knew I was.
"What are you doing there?" she asked. "Watching a star." "You were
not watching a star," said my mother, who was listening on her balcony;
"children of your age know nothing of astronomy." "Ah, madame,"
cried Mademoiselle Caroline, "he has opened the faucet of the reservoir;
the garden is inundated!" Then there was a general excitement. The fact
was that my sisters had amused themselves by turning the cock to see
the water flow, but a sudden spurt wet them all over and frightened
them so much that they ran away without closing it. Accused and
convicted of this piece of mischief and told that I lied when I denied it,
I was severely punished. Worse than all, I was jeered at for my
pretended love of the stars and forbidden to stay in the garden after
dark.
Such tyrannical restrains intensify a passion in the hearts of children
even more than in those of men; children think of nothing but the
forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly attractive to them. I
was often whipped for my star. Unable to confide in my kind, I told it
all my troubles in that delicious inward prattle with which we stammer
our first ideas, just as once we stammered our first words. At twelve
years of age, long after I was at school, I still watched that star with
indescribable delight,--so deep and lasting are the impressions we
receive in the dawn of life.
My brother Charles, five years older than I and as handsome a boy as
he now