spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with myself, for I was
at once the player and the cards.

"This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep life in me for
three years--the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a

work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a
fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a

hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and
ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a

sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to
await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I imperiled my life in order

to live. By reducing my requirements to real needs and the barest
necessaries, I found that three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed

for a year of penury; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender
sum, so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline."

"Impossible!" cried Emile.
"I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael answered, with a

kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. Three sous for bread, two for
milk, and three for cold meat, kept me from dying of hunger, and my

mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know,
the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My

lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at
night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce

the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in
coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had

three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to
some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only

amounted to eighteen sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I
cannot recollect, during that long period of toil, either crossing the

Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I went out to fetch it every
morning from the fountain in the Place Saint Michel, at the corner of

the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my povertyproudly. A man urged on towards
a fair future walks through life like an innocent person to his death;

he feels no shame about it.
"I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the hospital

without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of my health, and besides,
the poor can only take to their beds to die. I cut my own hair till

the day when an angel of love and kindness . . . But I do not want to
anticipate the state of things that I shall reach later. You must

simply know that I lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a
dream, an illusion which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day

I laugh at myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now
no more. I have since had a closer view of society and the world, of

our manners and customs, and seen the dangers of my innocent credulity
and the superfluous nature of my fervent toil. Stores of that sort are

quite useless to aspirants for fame. Light should be the baggage of
seekers after fortune!

"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of
patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are

laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink
under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers

come and go who are wealthy" target="_blank" title="a.富有的；丰富的">wealthy in words and destitute in ideas, astonish
the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little

knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march ahead; the one
sort is modest, and the other impudent; the man of genius is silent

about his own merits, but these schemers make a flourish of theirs,
and they are bound to get on. It is so strongly to the interest of men

in office to believe in ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced
merit, that it is downrightchildish of the learned to expect material

rewards. I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song
of songs that obscure genius is for ever singing; I want to come, in a

logical manner, by the reason of the frequent successes of mediocrity.
Alas! study shows us such a mother's kindness that it would be a sin

perhaps to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful
pleasures with which she sustains her children.

"Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs--

brown, gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green
mosses. At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very

soon found peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of
light through half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark

abysses of this strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the
street lamps sent up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street

dimly outlined the undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a
motionless sea. Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy

waste; above the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an
old woman's crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums;

or, in a crazy attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite
alone as she dressed herself--a view of nothing more than a fair

forehead and long tresses held above her by a pretty white arm.
"I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds

that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet that

fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my recreations
--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden

gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries
of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance event, in

fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to love this
prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie of roofs,

beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and harmonized
with my thoughts.

"Sudden descents into the world from the divineheight of scientific
meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended

perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most

out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of

fourteen playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny,
her winsome ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not

yet over; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting before
their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country town. At first I

watched the charming expression of the girl's face and her graceful
attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. It was a pretty sight. I looked

about me, seeking to understand this blithesimplicity in the midst of
Paris, and saw that the street was a blind alley and but little

frequented. I remembered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and
looked up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition awakened

hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter.
"I found myself in a room with a low ceiling; the candles, in classic-

looking copper candle-sticks, were set in a row under each key. The
predominating cleanliness of the room made a strikingcontrast to the

usual state of such places. This one was as neat as a bit of genre;
there was a charming trimness about the blue coverlet, the cooking

pots and furniture. The mistress of the house rose and came to me. She
seemed to be about forty years of age; sorrows had left their traces

on her features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially
mentioned the amount I could pay; it seemed to cause her no surprise;

she sought out a key from the row, went up to the attics with me, and
showed me a room that looked out on the neighboring roofs and courts;

long poles with linen drying on them hung out of the window.
"Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with

its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a
steep slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles.

There was room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the
highest point of the roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough

to furnish this cage (that might have been one of the Piombi of
Venice), the poor woman had never been able to let it; and as I had

saved from the recent sale the furniture that was in a fashion
peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms with my landlady, and moved

in on the following day.
"For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked

unflaggingly day and night; and so great was the pleasure that study
seemed to me the fairest theme and the happiest solution of life. The

tranquillity and peace that a scholar needs is something as sweet and
exhilarating as love. Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the

exertion of our mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil
contemplation of knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely

intellectual and impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use
material terms to express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of

striking out in some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks,
and flowers around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze,--all

this would give, to those who knew them not, a very faint idea of the
exultation with which my soul bathed itself in the beams of an unknown