“I scarcely ever played; I had no companions; I passed my hours in homesickness; I spent the whole night weeping in my bed.  I sought to bring before my mind recollections of home, trifling memories of little things, little events.  I thought incessantly of all I had left behind there.  I became almost imperceptibly an over-sensitive youth to whom the slightest annoyances were terrible griefs.

“In this way I remained taciturn, self-absorbed, without expansion, without confidants.  This mental excitement was going on secretly and surely.  The nerves of children are quickly affected, and one should see to it that they live a tranquil life until they are almost fully developed.  But who ever reflects that, for certain boys, an unjust imposition may be as great a pang as the death of a friend in later years?  Who can explain why certain young temperaments are liable to terrible emotions for the slightest cause, and may eventually become morbid and incurable?

“This was my case.  This faculty of regret developed in me to such an extent that my existence became a martyrdom.

“I did not speak about it; I said nothing about it; but gradually I became so sensitive that my soul resembled an open wound.  Everything that affected me gave me painful twitchings, frightful shocks, and consequently impaired my health.  Happy are the men whom nature has buttressed with indifference and armed with stoicism.

“I reached my sixteenth year.  An excessive timidity had arisen from this abnormal sensitiveness.  Feeling myself unprotected from all the attacks of chance or fate, I feared every contact, every approach, every current.  I lived as though I were threatened by an unknown and always expected misfortune.  I did not venture either to speak or do anything in public.  I had, indeed, the feeling that life, is a battle, a dreadful conflict in which one receives terrible blows, grievous, mortal wounds.  In place of cherishing, like all men, a cheerful anticipation of the morrow, I had only a confused fear of it, and 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 occurrence showed me clearly, all of a sudden, the diseased condition of my mind, made me understand the danger, and determined me to flee from it.

“Verdiers is a little town surrounded with plains and woods.  In the central street stands my parents’ house.  I now passed my days far from this dwelling which I had so much regretted, so much desired.  Dreams had reawakened in me, and I walked alone in the fields in order to let them escape and fly away.  My father and 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 after the manner of hardheaded, practical people; they had more reason than heart in their affection for me.  I lived imprisoned in my thoughts, and vibrating with my eternal sensitiveness.