Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: going into the empty room, I found Mlle. Rosalie there crying. She could cry then, this Mlle. Rosalie, who was so terrible when she punished the children with her long switch at the infants’ school which we attended, and of which she was the mistress. But let us leave Mlle. Rosalie. I should like to go still further back into the past, to those first sensations which stand out faintly from the confused mist in which my memory, becoming fainter and fainter, finally loses itself?the dawn of the beginning, the light which dimly illuminates nothingness. There I see vague white shapes move about, and faces bend over me, of which all the features are indistinct, except the eyes that shine like stars, there I see smiles and eddying whirlpools. When I begin to discern more clearly the forms of things, building was going on at our house. They were adding a new wing to the old part of the structure. Immense walls rose into the air, and on ladders which seemed to reach into infinity men were perpetually going up and down. They had dug a hole for a pump, and the water they drew out of it at first was quite white. I thought it was milk?milk from the earth ! I wanted to drink some of it. On account of my mother’s delicate health, I had been brought up by a nurse. Her name was Henriette. I called her Mtmtre. She was a young widow, a brunette, very active in her movements, and she loved me as she did her own children?an attachment which I reciprocated to the end. Poor, and extremely neat, she lived in a room in a cottage in the neighborhood, which she divided by means of a curtain of cheap material, ornamented with blue flowers on a white ground. A single window, opening on to the street, lighted up an oaken wardrobe, kept scrupulously clean, surmounted by an ttagtre on which were …