ERNEST RENAN 103 



His father was a sea captain who, in his old age, in unwise 

 commercial ventures had lost the savings of a laborious life. When 

 he died at sea rather mysteriously in 1818, his widow was left 

 with hardly any property and two children: Henriette, aged 

 seventeen, and little Ernest, twelve years younger. But Henriette 

 saved the family; her little earnings as a teacher and later as a 

 governess in a Polish castle, made it possible to give her brother 

 the best opportunities. It had been taken for granted that he 

 would become a priest; his intelligence and gentleness, his lack of 

 strength, his poverty and the traditions of his family did not seem 

 to leave any alternative. He received his first education in the 

 excellent cathedral school of Treguier, and achieved so much 

 success that he was called in 1838 to the seminary of St. Nicolas 

 du Chardonnet in Paris, then in the process of reorganization. 

 Four industrious years at Saint Nicolas promoted one generally to 

 the greater seminary of Saint Sulpice to work on higher studies. 

 The first year was devoted chiefly to philosophy and that teach- 

 ing took place, not in the main house, but in a country mansion 

 located in Issy, near Vaugirard. This was a beautiful residence 

 which had been inhabited at the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century by Margaret of Valois, the first wife of Henry IV. It had 

 kept much of its old-fashioned elegance and dignity. The park 

 was particularly graceful and Renan spent much of his time in it, 

 sitting on a stone bench in one of the long alleys, reading inde- 

 fatigably and meditating to his heart's content. He said later that 

 this park had been, after the cathedral of Treguier, the second 

 cradle of his thought; he could never see an arbor or a hedge of 

 yoke-elms cut in the conventional manner of his country, nor 

 smell damp leaves in the autumn, without remembering his long 

 and melancholy meditations of Issy. In 1843 he was finally ad- 

 mitted into the main house of Saint Sulpice in Paris, and there he 

 spent three fruitful years studying more theology, but also He- 

 brew and Syriac. 



It was during these last school years that he resolved to devote 

 his life to the study of the origins of Christianity, but his philo- 



