e
and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive
proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.

For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the
religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears
of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left
bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the
correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve
francs a day--far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had
appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students
near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night
with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as
much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him
books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free
hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like
pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.

For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he
accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the
free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his
sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often
passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet,
and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods
surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament;
curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these
escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener,
he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.

History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly
with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had
read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs.
Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could
he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that
before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure
men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan
morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of
Greek philosophy.

Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of
existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of
blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which
the early swee