Life is only of value by
devotion to what is true and good. Your conception of what is good was
too narrow; your view of truth too material and too concrete, but
you were, upon the whole, in the right, and I thank you for having
inculcated in me like a second nature the principle, fatal to worldly
success but prolific of happiness, that the aim of a life worth living
should be ideal and unselfish.
Most of my fellow-students were brawny and high-spirited young
peasants from the neighbourhood of Treguier, and, like most
individuals occupying an inferior place in the scale of civilization,
they were inclined to air an exaggerated regard for bodily strength,
and to show a certain amount of contempt for women and for anything
which they considered effeminate. Most of them were preparing for the
priesthood. My experiences of that time put me in a very good position
for understanding the historical phenomena, which occur when a
vigorous barbarism first comes into contact with civilization. I can
quite easily understand the intellectual condition of the Germans at
the Carlovingian epoch, the psychological and literary condition of
a Saxo Grammaticus and a Hrabanus Maurus. Latin had a very singular
effect upon their rugged natures, and they were like mastodons going
in for a degree. They took everything as serious as the Laplanders
do when you give them the Bible to read. We exchanged with regard to
Sallust and Livy, impressions which must have resembled those of the
disciples of St.
Pages:
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118