A celebrated novel has made the names of _Tholomyés_ and of _Marius_ familiar to many. The former personifies the student with base passions, the hero of the day, whose morals I have sketched—who becomes an important personage, a member of parliament, all the while he is continuing to be, without control, the cause of ruin to women and children. The second pictures the young student, true to a first love, which keeps alive in him noble and elevated feelings, and confers happiness on him through marriage. Men affecting to be serious, have, in this matter, accused the author of exaggeration and falsehood. It may, nevertheless, be asserted that our higher course of instruction reckons, among those who are its objects, many more of the _Tholomyés_ than the _Marius_ type, and that it is even organised in a way to nourish these profligate men. Who does not know that on the appearance of the _Misérables_ our _Tholomyés_ of the _quartier latin_ were making sport of their mistresses by styling them _Fautine_? If we wish to leave the domain of fiction, let a careful inquiry be made into the number of young men away from home in our towns without becoming depraved in them; let this investigation be made among the fifteen and twenty thousand students living in Paris, far from their families, and let us be informed how many _Tholomyés_ seduce _Fautines_, and how many _Mariuses_ marry, or can marry, their sweethearts. For myself, I am endeavouring to base my assertions upon conscientious investigation: I have questioned many families having relations with students who are recommended to them from the provincial towns. All have assured me, sadly, that they have not been able to save _one_ of them from vice. A respectable woman, among others, after keeping in view twenty young men, had seen some who had remained one year, others two or three years, without contracting vicious habits; but all of them, before their departure from Paris, had finished by, more or less, losing their innocence in the fumes of excess, and were giving themselves up to those debasing pleasures, which, by corrupting the individual, destroy all social-ties. It is young men like these who, baptised in luxuriousness, make, as it were, a distinctive livery of it; for the rest, it is not a question of knowing if good or evil is the exception here, but of demonstrating all the odiousness there is in the impunity of a possible vice while the student is being initiated into the duties of the citizen.