832 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



three children. But Renan had no grudge against his destiny for 

 giving him these years of privation ; he was grateful for having 

 been brought up in the knowledge and love of poverty. All his 

 life he loved the poor, the humble, the common people. He never 

 turned his back on the lowly relatives he had left in Brittany. 

 Down to the last years of his life he loved to visit them ; and it is 

 characteristic of him that he kept the little home of his childhood 

 just as it was. His sister Henrietta, twelve years his senior — a 

 woman as remarkable for her force of mind and character as for 

 her passionate tenderness of heart — worked hard for her family, 

 giving lessons first in Tre'guier, then at a school in Paris, then in 

 Poland, and all the while watching with a sort of motherly solici- 

 tude the progress of this young brother, whose gifts she had 

 already recognized. Young Ernest was meanwhile doing his 

 " humanities " under the good priests in the seminary at Treguier 

 — a gentle and studious scholar, carrying off all the first prizes as 

 a matter of course, and seeing before him no larger future than 

 that of a simple and learned priest among his own people, with 

 perhaps, at last, a canonry in some cathedral. But it so happened 

 that his sister had met in Paris a young, brilliant, and ambitious 

 abbe', M. Dupanloup, who had just been appointed head of the 

 seminary of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet, and who was looking 

 out for clever recruits. She spoke to him of her brother ; and the 

 result was that, at fifteen and a half years old, Ernest Renan 

 found himself transplanted to Paris, where he astonished his new 

 masters by his marvelous facility of acquisition and the early 

 maturity of his mind, and, after passing through his course of 

 philosophy in the seminary of Issy, was entered at Saint Sulpice 

 for his theology. Saint Sulpice was then the only seminary in 

 France which kept up the tradition of the severer studies, and 

 which, in particular, taught the Oriental languages. Its teachers 

 — especially the eminent Orientalist, Father Le Hir — recalled, by 

 the austerity of their life and the profundity of their learning, 

 the great scholars of the Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries. Renan rapidly became the friend, and then the rival, 

 of his masters, who discerned in him one of the future glories of 

 their house, and little guessed that the very lessons he received 

 there were to separate him from it forever. 



The crisis, when it came, was a purely intellectual crisis. By 

 training him in comparative philology and criticism, and by en- 

 couraging the scrutiny of the sacred writings, the priests of Saint 

 Sulpice had placed in the hands of their young disciple the most 

 formidable instrument of negation. His quick intelligence, lucid, 

 penetrating, and sincere, perceived at once the weakness of the 

 theological structure on which rests the whole weight of Catholic 

 doctrine. All that he had learned at Issy of natural science and 



