such terrors for me. But, at the same time, I did not disguise from myself the difficulties in the way of the career to which I had devoted my life; I knew that it would require deeper and more special study than any other profession; that before I could experiment successfully on living nature I must first perseveringly study the works of others. So I did not rest satisfied with a superficial study. One after the other, I took the works of men of genius, like Shakespeare, Molière, Corneille, Calderon, Goethe and Schiller, laid them out as bodies on a dissecting table, and, scalpel in hand, I spent whole nights in probing them to the heart in order to find the sources of life and the secret of the circulation of their blood. And after a while I discovered with what admirable science they galvanised nerve and muscle into life, and by what skill they modelled the differing types of flesh that were destined to cover the one unchangeable human framework of bone. For man does not invent. God has given the created world into his hands, and left him to apply it to his needs. Progress simply means the daily, monthly and everlasting conquest of man over matter. Each individual as he appears on the scene takes possession of the knowledge of his fathers, works it up in different ways, and then dies after he has added one ray more to the sum of human knowledge which he bequeaths to his sons,--one star in the Milky Way! I was then not only trying to complete my dramatic work but also my dramatic education. But that is an error, one's work may be finished some day, but one's education never! I had just about concluded my play, after two months' peace and encouragement in my humble post in the Archives Office, when I received notice from the Secretariat that, as my position was almost a sinecure, it had been done away with, and that I must hold myself ready to enter the Forestry Department--under M. Deviolaine. So the storm that had been hanging over my head for long had burst at last. I said good-bye to old father Bichet with tears in my eyes, and to his two friends MM. Pieyre and Parseval de Grandmaison, who promised to follow my career with sympathetic interest wherever I might be. The reader knows M. Deviolaine. During the five years I had been in the Government offices I had been looked upon as a _bête-noir_, so I entered upon my new official work under no very favourable auspices.