Two years later, when Jules was eight and his brother Emile was nine, their mother and siblings returned to Montevideo, and the two older boys were left behind to board at the local lycée in Tarbes.
During the difficult and lonely years at the hated lycée Jules began writing, and his literary début, written sometime around the age of eleven, took the prophetic form of satirical verse mocking his sixth-form teacher. Laforgue's boarding-school experience was to have a lasting effect, and his lifelong struggles with feelings of isolation and abandonment--motifs that informed both his life and his poetry--may be traced, at least in part, to these early years of exile from his family. By the same token the Tarbes lycée provided a rich store of images for his poetry, which echoes with chilly scenes of coughing children and desolate dormitories. One of La forgue's first short stories, "Stéphane Vassiliew," is the thinly masked tale of a Russian orphan who attends a Tarbes-like lycée where he suffers physically (from the chilblains that plagued Jules and Emile) and emotionally, only to die a romantic, consumptive death remarkably similar to Laforgue's own little more than a decade later.
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