then possessed an excellent public library, and there Pierre-Joseph
would read regularly. His zeal soon aroused the interest o f Charles
Weiss, the librarian, who had watched him reading assiduously
from eight or ten books at a time, and one day remarked: ‘But
what do you want to do with so many books, my little friend?’
Pierre-Joseph, whom experience had made defiantly independent,
scowled at his questioner, and replied surlily: ‘What has that to do
with you ?’ Weiss accepted the rebuff in silence, but from that time
he took a close interest in the boy’s progress.
It was during his fourth year at school that Pierre-Joseph began
to doubt the religious dogmas which his teachers attempted to
inculcate. His upbringing had not been irreligious, for Claude-
Frangois and his wife had the simple faith, without supereroga
tion, o f the ordinary Comtois peasant, and Catherine regularly
led her children in prayer. As for Pierre-Joseph, he experienced
as a child an almost instinctive acceptance of God. ‘Seized since
childhood with that great idea,’ he declared, ‘I felt it overflowing
within me and dominating all my faculties.’
Y et even as a boy he had little use for the overt acts o f religious
ritual. He talked of his first Communion as having been forced
upon him, and regretted not having shown the courage o f a friend
who appeared at the altar rail holding boldly before him a copy
of d’Holbach’s heretical Systlme de la Nature. ‘I have always had
little taste for the works o f the devout life,’ he declared. ‘To con
fess, take Communion, kiss the crucifix, attend the washing of
feet— all that was displeasing to me.’
During the Legitimist Restoration there were great efforts at
religious revivals in the French provinces; in 1825 a Mission was
preached in Besangon, and the excessive manifestations o f pietism
had a wholly adverse effect on Pierre-Joseph, who was then in his
sixteenth year.
Yet, while there is no doubt that such scenes had a profound
influence on the thoughts o f this resentful youth, it seems unlikely
that this would have been so strong if his intellectual ex
periences had not acted as a fulcrum by which the revulsion
against excessive piety could work on his deeper religious feelings.
One of the prizes he received at the end of his fourth year was
Fenelon’s Demonstration de /’Existence de Dieu, an essay in
Christian apologetics which has long passed out o f circulation.
‘This book,’ he said thirteen years later, ‘seemed suddenly to open
THE HILLS OF THE JURA