For that he was given detention by his teacher Gustave Hinstin, which depressed the young Isidore. According to his schoolmate, Paul Lespès, he showed obvious folly 'by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images' in an essay. In school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe, and particularly devoured Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire. He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and already showed extravagance in his thinking and style. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat). He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, Isidore was sent to high school in France by his father. Ducasse was brought up to speak three languages: French, Spanish and English.

In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year siege of Montevideo in the Argentine- Uruguayan war. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November, 1847, in the cathedral of Montevideo and that his mother died shortly afterwards, probably due to an epidemic. Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer and his wife, Jacquette-Célestine Davezac.

Comte de lautréamont poems