At college, the poor youth's difficulties were of course very great. He knew nothing of Greek, nor of classical versification, and he had no one to help him--"my father, however, set himself to making Latin verses--he who had never made any before." His professor, M. Andrieu d'Alba, "a man of heart, a man of God," was kind enough to him, but his comrades were very much the contrary; they ridiculed him and bemocked his dress and his poverty. "I was in the middle of them like an owl at mid-day, quite scared." He began to feel, indeed, that he was poor; he fell into a state of misanthropy rare at such an age; he thought, "that all the rich were bad--that all men were bad," for he saw few that were not richer than he was. "Nevertheless," he adds, and this is singular, if true, "in all my excessive antipathy to mankind, so much good remained in me, that I had no envy." But one day--a Thursday morning--in the midst of all his troubles and privations (there was no fire, though the snow lay all round, and there were great doubts if there would be any bread that evening), "I struck my hand, burst open by the cold, on my oaken table (I have that table still), and felt a manly joy of vigor and a future for me." Doubtless, in the lives of many men, there have been such moments--moments when all is dark, when the necessaries of life are wanting, and there is no friend to cheer or pity--moments when the tides of life and hope are equally at their ebb, and when, if ever it were allowable, a man might be permitted to despair--when, nevertheless, a confidence, an inspiration suddenly buoys up the spirit in triumph and exultation, and a determination arises, and a freshness is infused which bears them on thenceforth, conquering and to conquer. Thirty years afterward, Michelet is seated at the same oaken table, and looks at his hand, still showing the scar of 1813. But all else is changed: he is in easy circumstances; he is the popular author, the popular professor; but he remembers, and his heart says to him, "Thou art warm, and others are cold; this is not just. Oh! who will bring me comfort for this hard inequality?" And he consoles himself characteristically with the thought of working for the people by giving to his country her history; for, to Michelet, history and the people are much the same thing as grammar was to his old friend, the schoolmaster with the unfinished manuscript.