My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when
she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom.
I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the
world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education.
This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish
taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my
true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These,
however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what
I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I
simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the
same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects,
I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to
me. It was simply memory. It was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of
what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to
teach me.
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