iness, hands, twelve times a year, a purse of gold, the budget of
her personal fancies, dream of so many different purchases, each of
which would absorb the whole sum, as we imagined possible on the eve of
the first Sunday in each month? For six francs during one night we owned
every delight of that inexhaustible shop! and during Mass every response
we chanted was mixed up in our minds with our secret calculations.
Which of us all can recollect ever having had a sou left to spend on
the Sunday following? And which of us but obeyed the instinctive law of
social existence by pitying, helping, and despising those pariahs who,
by the avarice or poverty of their parents, found themselves penniless?

Any one who forms a clear idea of this huge college, with its monastic
buildings in the heart of a little town, and the four plots in which
we were distributed as by a monastic rule, will easily conceive of
the excitement that we felt at the arrival of a new boy, a passenger
suddenly embarked on the ship. No young duchess, on her first appearance
at Court, was ever more spitefully criticised than the new boy by the
youths in his division. Usually during the evening play-hour before
prayers, those sycophants who were accustomed to ingratiate themselves
with the Fathers who took it in turns two and two for a week to keep an
eye on us, would be the first to hear on trustworthy authority: "There
will be a new boy to-morrow!" and then suddenly the shout, "A New
Boy!--A New Boy!" rang through the courts. We hurried up to crowd round
the superintendent and pester him with questions:

"Where was he coming from? What was his name? Which class would he be
in?" and so forth.

Louis Lambert's advent was the subject of a romance worthy of the
_Arabian Nights_. I was in the fourth class at the time--among the
little boys. Our housemasters were two men whom we called Fathers from
habit and tradition, though they were not priests. In my time there
were indeed but three genuine Oratorians to whom this title legitimately
belonged; in 1814 they all left the college, which had gradually become
secularized, to find occupation about the altar in various country
parishes, like the cure of Mer.

Father Haugoult, the master for the week, was not a bad man, but of very
moderate attainments, and he lacked the tact which is indispensable for
discerning the different characters of children, and graduating their
punishment to their powers of resistance. Fa