ours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and
ate well in the refectory. He had _in loco parentis_ a wholesale
ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays
after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the
boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o'clock before
supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with
red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history note-books, or
read an old volume of "Anarchasis" that was knocking about the study.
When we went for walks he talked to the servant who, like himself, came
from the country.

By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once
even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his
third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study
medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.

His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she
knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board,
got him furniture, a table and two chairs, sent home for an old
cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with
the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child. Then at the end of a
week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good, now that he
was going to be left to himself.

The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him: lectures on
anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on
pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics,
without counting hygiene and materia medica--all names of whose
etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to
sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.

He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen--he did
not follow. Still he worked; he had bound note-books, he attended all
the courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task
like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not
knowing what work he is doing.

To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a
piece of veal baked in the oven, on which he lunched when he came back
from the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After
this he had to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the
hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the
evening, after the poo