"Bianchon, if you have sometimes seen me hard and bitter, it was

because I was adding my early sufferings on to the insensibility,
the selfishness of which I have seen thousands of instances in

the highest circles; or, perhaps, I was thinking of the obstacles
which hatred, envy, jealousy, and calumny raised up between me

and success. In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set
your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others

loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your
skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your

whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you
see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make
acquaintance before long with the odious and incessant warfare

waged by mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop
five-and-twenty louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on

the next, and your best friends will report that you have lost
twenty-five thousand. If you have a headache, you will be

considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one can live with
you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies, you

collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny.

In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults
will be vices, and your virtues crime.

"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he
reappears on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured

the present at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will
die. Stumble, and you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim

your rights, you will be crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to
rising younger men.

"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I
believe still less in man. But do not you know in me another

Desplein, altogether different from the Desplein whom every one
abuses?--However, we will not stir that mud-heap.

"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my
first examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had

come to one of those moments of extremity when a man says, 'I
will enlist.' I had one hope. I expected from my home a box full

of linen, a present from one of those old aunts who, knowing
nothing of Paris, think of your shirts, while they imagine that

their nephew with thirty francs a month is eating ortolans. The
box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost forty francs

for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a loft,
had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue

des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de
Medecine without hitting on any scheme which would release my

trunk without the payment of the forty francs, which of course I
could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen. My stupidity

proved to me that surgery was my only vocation. My good fellow,
refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty atmosphere, have none

of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile in resource and
device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent, things

come to them.
"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger

also came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-
Flour. We knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off

the same landing, and who hear each other sleeping, coughing,
dressing, and so at last become used to one another. My neighbor

informed me that the landlord, to whom I owed three quarters'
rent, had turned me out; I must clear out next morning. He

himself was also turned out on account of his occupation. I spent
the most miserable night of my life. Where was I to get a

messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How could
I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these

unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen
repeat their tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends

heavenly slumbers full of beautiful dreams.
"Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread

soaked in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile
Auvergne accent:

" 'Mouchieur l'Etudiant, I am a poor man, a foundling from the
hospital at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not

rich enough to marry. You are not fertile in relations either,
nor well supplied with the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart

downstairs which I have hired for two sous an hour; it will hold
all our goods; if you like, we will try to find lodgings

together, since we are both turned out of this. It is not the
earthly paradise, when all is said and done.'

" 'I know that, my good Bourgeat,' said I. 'But I am in a great
fix. I have a trunk downstairs with a hundred francs' worth of

linen in it, out of which I could pay the landlord and all I owe
to the porter, and I have not a hundred sous.'

" 'Pooh! I have a few dibs,' replied Bourgeat joyfully, and he
pulled out a greasy old leather purse. 'Keep your linen.'

"Bourgeat paid up my arrears and his own, and settled with the
porter. Then he put our furniture and my box of linen in his

cart, and pulled it along the street, stopping in front of every
house where there was a notice board. I went up to see whether

the rooms to let would suit us. At midday we were still wandering
about the neighborhood without having found anything. The price

was the great difficulty. Bourgeat proposed that we should eat at
a wine shop, leaving the cart at the door. Towards evening I

discovered, in the Cour de Rohan, Passage du Commerce, at the
very top of a house next the roof, two rooms with a staircase

between them. Each of us was to pay sixty francs a year. So there
we were housed, my humble friend and I. We dined together.

Bourgeat, who earned about fifty sous a day, had saved a hundred
crowns or so; he would soon be able to gratify his ambition by

buying a barrel and a horse. On learning of my situation--for he
extracted my secrets with a quiet craftiness and good nature, of

which the remembrance touches my heart to this day, he gave up
for a time the ambition of his whole life; for twenty-two years

he had been carrying water in the street, and he now devoted his
hundred crowns to my future prospects."

Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon's arm tightly. "He gave
me the money for my examination fees! That man, my friend,

understood that I had a mission, that the needs of my intellect
were greater than his. He looked after me, he called me his boy,

he lent me money to buy books, he would come in softly sometimes
to watch me at work, and took a mother's care in seeing that I

had wholesome and abundant food, instead of the bad and
insufficient nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a man

of about forty, had a homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent
forehead, a head that a painter might have chosen as a model for

that of Lycurgus. The poor man's heart was big with affections
seeking an object; he had never been loved but by a poodle that

had died some time since, of which he would talk to me, asking
whether I thought the Church would allow masses to be said for

the repose of its soul. His dog, said he, had been a good
Christian, who for twelve years had accompanied him to church,

never barking, listening to the organ without opening his mouth,
and crouching beside him in a way that made it seem as though he

were praying too.
"This man centered all his affections in me; he looked upon me as

a forlorn and suffering creature, and he became, to me, the most
thoughtful mother, the most consideratebenefactor, the ideal of

the virtue which rejoices in its own work. When I met him in the
street, he would throw me a glance of intelligence full of

unutterable dignity; he would affect to walk as though he carried
no weight, and seemed happy in seeing me in good health and well

dressed. It was, in fact, the devotedaffection of the lower
classes, the love of a girl of the people transferred to a

loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at night at
any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good as

a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl.
He did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood,

and gave to all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving