My childhood had been spent in darkness, my adolescence was passed in a void; not having been a child I could no more be a young man. I lived in a sort of fog. A thousand thoughts were agitating me, but they were so confused that I could not seize upon their form; none of them detached itself clearly from this depth of opaque mist. I had some aspirations; some exalted notions, but it would have been impossible for me to formulate them, to explain their cause or reason. It would have been impossible for me to say into which world of reality or dream they transplanted me; I had fits of infinite tenderness, in which my whole being would lose itself, but for whom or for what this feeling was intended, I did not know. Sometimes, all of a sudden, I would abandon myself to tears, but the reason for these tears? In truth, I knew not. What was certain was that nothing was to my liking, that I did not see any purpose in living, that I felt myself incapable of any effort.
Children usually say: "I'll be a general, priest, physician, innkeeper." I never said anything of the kind, never; never did I tear myself loose from the present; never did I venture a glimpse into the future. Man appeared to me like a tree which spread out its foliage and stretched out its limbs into the stormy skies, without knowing which flower would bloom at its foot, which birds would sing at its top, or which thunderbolt would fell it to the ground. And notwithstanding that, the feeling of moral solitude in which I found myself oppressed and frightened me. I could not open my heart to my father, to my teacher or to anybody else. I had no friend, not a living soul who could understand, guide or love me. My father and preceptor were disheartened by my waywardness, and in the country I passed for a feebleminded maniac. In spite of everything, however, I was permitted to take my college entrance examinations, and though neither my father nor myself had any idea as to what I should take up, I went to Paris to study law. "Law will get you anywhere," my father used to say.
Paris amazed me. It struck me like a place of tempestuous uproar and raving madness. Individuals and throngs were passing by, strange, incoherent, hurrying to work which I imagined terrible and monstrous. Knocked down by horses, jostled by men, deafened by the roar of the city always in motion like some colossal and hellish factory, blinded by the glare of lights to which I was not accustomed, I roamed about the city in the strange dream of a demented one. I was very much surprised to find trees there. How could they grow there, in that soil of pavements, how could they shoot upwards in the forest of stone, amidst the rumbling noise of men, their branches lashed by evil winds?