ld treatise on geometry. He plunged into this study without a guide,
racking his brains for weeks together in order to grasp the simplest
problem in the world. In this matter he gradually became one of those
learned workmen who can hardly sign their name and yet talk about
algebra as though it were an intimate friend.

Nothing unsettles the mind so much as this desultory kind of education,
which reposes on no firm basis. Most frequently such scraps of knowledge
convey an absolutely false idea of the highest truths, and render
persons of limited intellect insufferably stupid. In Silvere's case,
however, his scraps of stolen knowledge only augmented his liberal
aspirations. He was conscious of horizons which at present remained
closed to him. He formed for himself divine conceptions of things beyond
his reach, and lived on, regarding in a deep, innocent, religious way
the noble thoughts and grand conceptions towards which he was raising
himself, but which he could not as yet comprehend. He was one of the
simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained
on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a
distance he took for stars.

The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre consisted, in the first place,
of a large room into which the street door opened. The only pieces of
furniture in this room, which had a stone floor, and served both as a
kitchen and a dining-room, were some straw-seated chairs, a table on
trestles, and an old coffer which Adelaide had converted into a sofa, by
spreading a piece of woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand
corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin,
surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of
all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led
from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this
yard there was a well. Aunt Dide's bedroom was on the left side of the
passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one
chair; Silvere slept in a still smaller room on the right hand side,
just large enough for a trestle bedstead; and he had been obliged to
plan a set of shelves, reaching up to the ceiling, to keep by him
all those dear odd volumes which he saved his sous to purchase from a
neighbouring general dealer. When he read at night-time, he would hang
his lamp on a nail at the head of the bed. If his grandmother had an
attack, he merel