Note 160 — BOOK III[147]

"A solitary incident would vary these evenings, which might figure in a romance of the eleventh century. Sometimes my father would interrupt his walk and come and sit down by the hearth to tell us the story of his youthful distress and the crosses of his life. He described storms and dangers, a journey in Italy, a shipwreck on the Spanish coast.

"He had seen Paris; he spoke of it as he might speak of a haunt of abomination and of a foreign country. The Bretons looked upon China as being in their neighbourhood, but Paris seemed to them the end of the world. I eagerly listened to my father. When I heard this man who was so hard to himself regret that he had not done enough for his family and complain in short but bitter words of his fate, when I saw him at the conclusion of his recital rise brusquely, wrap himself in his cloak, and renew his tramp, first hastening his steps and then slowing them to correspond with the movements of his heart, filial love would fill my eyes with tears; I revolved my father's troubles in my mind, and it seemed to me that the sufferings undergone by the author of my days should have fallen upon me and me alone."—Manuscript of 1826.