The whole universe seemed to me like an arid and chilly
desert. With Christianity untrue, everything else appeared to me
indifferent, frivolous, and undeserving of interest. The shattering of
my career left me with a sense of aching void, like what may be felt
by one who has had an attack of fever or a blighted affection. The
struggle which had engrossed my whole soul had been so ardent that
all the rest appeared to me petty and frivolous. The world discovered
itself to me as mean and deficient in virtue. I seemed to have lost
caste, and to have fallen upon a nest of pigmies.
My sorrow was much increased by the grief which I had been compelled
to inflict upon my mother. I resorted, perhaps wrongly, to certain
artifices with the view, as I hoped, of sparing her pain. Her letters
went to my heart. She supposed my position to be even more painful
than it was in reality, and as she had, despite our poverty, rather
spoilt me, she thought that I should never be able to withstand any
hardship. "When I remember how a poor little mouse kept you from
sleeping, I am at a loss to know how you will get on," she wrote to
me. She passed her time singing the Marseilles hymns,[1] of which she
was so fond, especially the hymn of Joseph, beginning--
"O Joseph, o mon aimable
Fils affable."
When she wrote to me in this strain, my heart was fit to break. As a
child, I was in the habit of asking her ten times over in the course
of the day--"Mother, have I been good?" The idea of a rupture between
us was most cruel.
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