I was raised by women. I was the last son in a very numerous family; I had a sickly nature; my mother and my sisters were not very happy. So there were plenty of reasons why I was loved. There is so much goodness in the tenderness of women that for a long time now I have wanted to thank God for it. Our life, so austere, was quite frigid on the surface; we were afraid of my father, later of my older brothers; and nothing brings people together like being afraid together. Neither my mother nor my sisters were very expansive. Their presence was like dimmed lamps, which are very gentle and shed hardly any light but whose consistent glow prevents it from becoming too dark and prevents one from being truly alone. You cannot imagine how reassuring the calm affection of women was for an apprehensive child like myself. Their silence, their unimportant words which reflected nothing more than their calm, their familiar gestures which seemed to control things, their blank but tranquil faces which, somehow, resembled mine, taught me veneration. My mother died fairly early: you never knew her. Life and death also took away my sisters; but most of them were then so young that they seemed beautiful. All of them, I think, already possessed love, which they carried in the depths of themselves, in the same way that, later, when they had been married, they carried their infant or the illness of which they were to die. Nothing is so touching as those dreams of young girls, where so many dormant instincts are dimly expressed; theirs is an affecting beauty, for they give of themselves heedlessly, and ordinary life will not enjoy the use of them. I should explain that many of these love affairs were still very vague; they had for their objects the young men of the neighborhood, who were unaware of it. My sisters were very reserved; they rarely confided in one another. Sometimes they were ignorant of what they themselves felt. Naturally, I was much too young for them to confide in me; but I guessed what they were feeling and shared in their sorrows. When the man they were in love with would arrive unexpectedly, my heart raced, possibly more than theirs. It is dangerous, I am sure, for a sensitive adolescent to learn to view love through the dreams of young girls, even when they seem to be pure and he imagines himself to be pure also.