Excerpt from Chapters From Some Unwritten Memoirs My poet was a hairdresser by profession and a barber as well. His name was Jasmin (jaquou Jansemin in the langue d'oc). He was born in 1798 at Agen in the south of France; born, he writes, of a humpback father and a halting mother in the corner of an old street, in a crowded dwelling, peopled by many rats, on Holy Thursday, at the hour when pancakes are tossed. The humpback father was also a poet in his way, and composed songs for the itinerant players of the neighbour hood. 50 soon as Jasmin could walk he used to accompany his father to the booths, but what he liked better still was gathering faggots in the little islands of the Garonne. Bare headed, bare-footed, he writes, we rowed across the stream. I was not alone, - there were twenty of us - there were thirty of us. We started at the stroke of the mid-day hour, singing in choir. In the evening the children returned as they had left, thirty voices chaunting the same cadence, and thirty faggots dancing on thirty heads. They were so poor that Jacques felt it bitterly, because his parents could not afford to send him to school. One day he was playing in the market-place When he saw his grandfather carried by to the hospital. It was there the Jasmins were in the habit of dying. But a cousin taught him to read; he became apprenticed to a barber, he rose to be a hairdresser, and prospered in his vocation; so that he was able to save his father from the usual fate of the Jasmins. The young hairdresser christened his first poemsles pafiz'z/oiesfin honour of his profession which songs, says he, brought a silver stream let through my shop and upon this streamlet he floated to better fortunes than were usual to the Jasmin family. One day in a fit of poetic ardour he broke the terrible arm-chair in which they had all been in the habit of being carried to the hospital. Jasmin after he became celebrated would never abandon his home or his little shop. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.