In order to demonstrate that it is not impossible to live by literature, and more especially for the sake of establishing his material independence, he was ready to accept any sort of a task whatever. And all the more so, since his mother had not given up hope of making him accept one of those fine careers in which an industrious young fellow may win esteem and fortune. The "spectre of the daily grind" stared him in the face, and although he had escaped a notary's career, through the death of the man to whose practice he was to have succeeded, they gave him to understand that the sombre portals of a government position might open to him. "Count me among the dead," he wrote to his sister Laure, who, since her marriage, had resided at Bayeux, "if they clap that extinguisher over me. I should turn into a trick horse, who does his thirty or forty rounds per hour, and eats, drinks and sleeps at the appointed moment. And they call that living!--that mechanical rotation, that perpetual recurrence of the same thing!" In spite of a few short trips, and occasional brief sojourns in Paris, in the one foothold which his father had retained there, he was constrained by necessity to remain beneath the family roof-tree. They gave him his food and his clothing, but no money. He suffered from this, and groaned and grumbled as if he were in a state of slavery. Nevertheless, his unquenchable good humour and his determination to make his name famous and to acquire a fortune saved him from the impotence of melancholy. He drew spirited sketches of the family and sent them to Laure, to prove to her that he was resigned.