X

"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.