, you will be as much at home there as in your
father's house. The Count will give you a salary of two thousand four
hundred francs, rooms in his house, and an allowance of twelve hundred
francs in lieu of feeding you. He will not admit you to his table,
nor give you a separate table, for fear of leaving you to the care of
servants. I did not accept the offer when it was made to me till I was
perfectly certain that Comte Octave's secretary was never to be a mere
upper servant. You will have an immense amount of work, for the Count
is a great worker; but when you leave him, you will be qualified to fill
the highest posts. I need not warn you to be discreet; that is the first
virtue of any man who hopes to hold public appointments.'

"You may conceive of my curiosity. Comte Octave, at that time, held one
of the highest legal appointments; he was in the confidence of Madame
the Dauphiness, who had just got him made a State Minister; he led such
a life as the Comte de Serizy, whom you all know, I think; but even more
quietly, for his house was in the Marais, Rue Payenne, and he hardly
ever entertained. His private life escaped public comment by its
hermit-like simplicity and by constant hard work.

"Let me describe my position to you in a few words. Having found in the
solemn headmaster of the College Saint-Louis a tutor to whom my uncle
delegated his authority, at the age of eighteen I had gone through all
the classes; I left school as innocent as a seminarist, full of faith,
on quitting Saint-Sulpice. My mother, on her deathbed, had made my uncle
promise that I should not become a priest, but I was as pious as though
I had to take orders. On leaving college, the Abbe Loraux took me
into his house and made me study law. During the four years of study
requisite for passing all the examinations, I worked hard, but chiefly
at things outside the arid fields of jurisprudence. Weaned from
literature as I had been at college, where I lived in the headmaster's
house, I had a thirst to quench. As soon as I had read a few modern
masterpieces, the works of all the preceding ages were greedily
swallowed. I became crazy about the theatre, and for a long time I went
every night to the play, though my uncle gave me only a hundred francs
a month. This parsimony, to which the good old man was compelled by his
regard for the poor, had the effect of keeping a young man's desires
within reasonable limits.

"When I went to live with Comte Oc