My worthy tutors were not endowed
with any seductive qualities. With their unswerving moral solidity,
they were the very contrary of the southerners--of the Neapolitan, for
instance, who is all glitter and clatter. Ideas did not ring within
their minds with the sonorous clash of crossing swords. Their head was
like what a Chinese cap without bells would be; you might shake it,
but it would not jingle. That which constitutes the essence of talent,
the desire to show off one's thoughts to the best advantage, would
have seemed to them sheer frivolity, like women's love of dress, which
they denounced as a positive sin. This excessive abnegation of self,
this too ready disposition to repulse what the world at large likes by
an _Abrenuntio tibi, Satana_, is fatal to literature. It will be said,
perhaps, that literature necessarily implies more or less of sin. If
the Gascon tendency to elude many difficulties with a joke, which I
derived from my mother, had always been dormant in me, my spiritual
welfare would perhaps have been assured. In any event, if I had
remained in Brittany I should never have known anything of the vanity
which the public has liked and encouraged--that of attaining a certain
amount of art in the arrangement of words and ideas. Had I lived in
Brittany I should have written like Rollin. When I came to Paris I had
no sooner given people a taste of what few qualities I possessed than
they took a liking for them, and so--to my disadvantage it may be--I
was tempted to go on.
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