e are
among them, in their 'quarter.' This deep silence is that of the labour
of all the young fellows who are leaning over their work-tables, and day
by day carrying forward the conquest of truth."

So saying Francois waved his hand towards all the day-schools and
colleges and high schools beyond the Luxembourg garden, towards the
Faculties of Law and Medicine, the Institute and its five Academies, the
innumerable libraries and museums which made up the broad domain of
intellectual labour. And Pierre, moved by it all, shaken in his theories
of negation, thought that he could indeed hear a low but far-spreading
murmur of the work of thousands of active minds, rising from
laboratories, studies and class, reading and lecture rooms. It was not
like the jerky, breathless trepidation, the loud clamour of factories
where manual labour toils and chafes. But here, too, there were sighs of
weariness, efforts as killing, exertion as fruitful in its results. Was
it indeed true that the cultured young were still and ever in their
silent forge, renouncing no hope, relinquishing no conquest, but in full
freedom of mind forging the truth and justice of to-morrow with the
invincible hammers of observation and experiment?

Francois, however, had raised his eyes to the palace clock to ascertain
the time. "I'm going to Montmartre," he said; "will you come part of the
way with me?"

Pierre assented, particularly as the young man added that on his way he
meant to call for his brother Antoine at the Museum of the Louvre. That
bright afternoon the Louvre picture galleries were steeped in warm and
dignified quietude, which one particularly noticed on coming from the
tumult and scramble of the streets. The majority of the few people one
found there were copyists working in deep silence, which only the
wandering footsteps of an occasional tourist disturbed. Pierre and
Francois found Antoine at the end of the gallery assigned to the
Primitive masters. With scrupulous, almost devout care he was making a
drawing of a figure by Mantegna. The Primitives did not impassion him by
reason of any particular mysticism and ideality, such as fashion pretends
to find in them, but on the contrary, and justifiably enough, by reason
of the sincerity of their ingenuous realism, their respect and modesty in
presence of nature, and the minute fidelity with which they sought to
transcribe it. He spent days of hard work in copying and studying them,
in order to le