The little Beranger, born with difficulty and only
with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of
Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly
cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed
traces of this privation of a mother's smile. The sentiment of home, of
family, is not merely absent from his poems,--it is sometimes shocked by
them.
Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school
in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw
the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He
never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later
in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the
fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The
truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt
more painfully by Beranger than it would have been by almost any other
person; for Beranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of
allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,--a delicate poet,
moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.
The _pension_ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the
narrow means of his father.
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