De L'Orme

I was born in the heart of Bearn, in the year 1619; and if the scenery amongst which we first open our eyes, and from which we receive our earliest impressions, could communicate its own peculiar character to our minds, I should certainly have possessed a thousand great and noble qualities, that might have taught me to play a very different part from that which I have done, in the great tragic farce of human life. Nevertheless, in contemplating the strange contrasts of scenery, the gay, the sparkling, the grand, the gloomy, the sublime, wherein my infant years were passed, I have often thought I saw a sort of picture of my own fate, with its abrupt and rapid changes; and even in some degree of my own character, or rather of my own mood, varying continually through all the different shades of disposition, from the lightest mirth to the most profound gloom, from the idlest heedlessness to the most anxious thought.