Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, long life, of which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember, were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations, conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them, welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion. They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to have a visit with them.” As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!” He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled in the kingdom of words.