frank avowal of eternal love by each, set of by the pathetic separation, and of the
undying love, and finally the tragic death and burial of each—all this owes its
charm, for its many generations of readers, to its merits as an essentially true
picture of the human heart at this critical age. This work and Rousseau[53] have
contributed to give French literature its peculiar cast in its description of this age.
"The first explosions of combustible constitution" in Rousseau's, precocious
nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations of erotic
voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at the feet of an
imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." He only wanted a
lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he was passionately devoted to a Mlle.
Vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow
no other to approach. He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mlle.
Goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely
under the power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him
were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's affection with
the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage.
When told of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore
never more to see a perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged
ephebeitis pervades much of his life.
Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child"[54] was written when the author was forty-two,
and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner autobiographies, and
is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring the author down to the
age of fourteen and a half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he
began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of
death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of
his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and perversity to
do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly omelet and carrying it in a
procession with song; the melting of pewter plates and pouring them into water
and salting a wild tract of land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he
led as if with keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets,
everything being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling
for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not
been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother,
with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and this became a long obsession
which finally led him to enlist in the navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the
momentous letter into the post-office after long misgivings and delays. He had a