some little time, M.
Berthelot, having completed his special mathematical studies at the
Lycee Henri IV., went back to his father, who lived at the foot of
the Tour Saint Jacques de la Boucherie. When he came to see me in the
evening at the Rue de l'Abbe de l'Epee, we used to converse for hours,
and then I used to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But
as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his
door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game
of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times. Social and
philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we
could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a
very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful
than we had been in solving the problems which it had set itself, but
it demonstrated the fragility of many things which were supposed to be
solid, and to young and active minds it seemed like the lowering of a
curtain of clouds upon the horizon.

The profound affection which thus bound M. Berthelot and myself
together was unquestionably of a very rare and singular kind. It
so happened that we were both of an essentially objective nature; a
nature, that is to say, perfectly free from the narrow whirlwind which
converts most consciences into an egotistical gulf like the conical
cavity of the formica-leo. Accustomed each to pay very little
attention to himself, we paid very little attention to one another.
Our friendship consisted in what we mutually learnt, in a sort of
common fermentation which a remarkable conformity of intellectual
organization produced in us in regard to the same objects. Anything
which we had both seen in the same light seemed to us a certainty.
When we first became acquainted, I still retained a tender attachment
for Christianity. Berthelot also inherited from his father a remnant
of Christian belief. A few months sufficed to relegate these vestiges
of faith to that part of our souls reserved for memory. The statement
that everything in the world is of the same colour, that there is no
special supernatural or momentary revelation, impressed itself upon
our minds as unanswerable. The scientific purview of a universe in
which there is no appreciable trace of any free will superior to that
of man became, from the first months of 1846, the immovable anchor
from which we never shifted. We shall never move from this position
until we shall have