ERNEST RENAN 



105 



have been without his sister's help; at any rate her unparalleled 

 courage and devotion made it much easier for him to do the only 

 thing which was completely honest. On the 6th of October, 1 845, 

 he left Saint Sulpice, wearing for the last time the cassock of a 

 seminarist. 



It must be said that his masters respected his decision and did 

 not cease, at least for some time, to be his friends; they had had 

 many opportunities to test the purity of his heart and they well 

 knew that there was in it neither revolt nor sensuality, but the 

 most genuine and intense religion. On the other hand, he himself 

 always spoke with the highest appreciation of the education 

 which they had imparted to him. Saint Sulpice in Renan's day 

 (and perhaps even now) was essentially a seventeenth-century 

 institution; nothing could remind one more of Port Royal or the 

 old Sorbonne than did this college where time seemed to have 

 stood still. The studies were extremely serious; there was a 

 healthy amount of freedom; the moral tone was the highest. The 

 theological teaching was rigorously honest. Some at least of his 

 teachers would have been the last, knowing the doubts preying on 

 his mind, to let him tie himself forever by a half-hearted taking of 

 sacred vows. They did not try in the least to make proselytes by 

 means of equivocations or to dispose of dogmatic difficulties or 

 textual contradictions by sleight-of-hand. They acted according to 

 the truth as they saw it, and Renan did nothing but follow their 

 admonitions, though the light which he saw was more distant and 

 drew him reluctantly far away from them. He was especially 

 grateful to his teacher of Semitic languages, and said of him : "All 

 that I am as a savant, I owe to M. Le Hir. I sometimes think that 

 I have never known well the things that I learned without him. 

 For example, he was not very strong in Arabic, and therefore I 

 have always remained a mediocre Arabist." But his thankfulness 

 was extended to the whole school and when later he reviewed his 

 life in Marcus Aurelius' manner, trying to determine the various 

 influences which had moulded it, he recognized that Saint Sulpice 

 had been by far the principal factor. The moral education of that 



