" 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.
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