said, 'Why do not they buy
cakes?' I should like to see one of these rich men, who complain that I
charge too much for an operation,--yes, I should like to see him alone
in Paris without a sou, without a friend, without credit, and forced to
work with his five fingers to live at all! What would he do? Where would
he go to satisfy his hunger?

"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.