My visit to your hermitage had made a profound impression. You appeared to me as a kind of modern Spinoza, so completely identical with your books by the nobility of a life entirely consecrated to thought. I created beforehand a romance of felicity at the idea that I should know the hours of your walks, that I should form the habit of meeting you in the old Jardin des Plantes, which undulates under your windows, that you would consent to direct me, that aided and sustained by you, I could also make my place in science; in fine you were for me the living certainty, the master, what Faust is for Wagner in the psychologic symphony of Goethe. Beside, the conditions which this preceptorate offered were particularly easy. I was above all to be the companion of a child twelve years of age, the second son of the Marquis de Jussat. I learned afterward why this family had retired for the whole winter to this château, near Lake Aydat, where they usually passed the autumn months only. M. de Jussat, who is originally from Auvergne, and who has held the office of minister plenipotentiary under the emperor, had just lost a large sum on the Bourse. His property being hypothecated, and his income greatly diminished, he had let his house on the Champs-Elysées furnished at a very high rent. He had arrived at his Jussat estate a little earlier, expecting to go directly to his villa at Cannes. An advantageous chance to let this villa also offered. The desire to free his property had tempted him, the more as an increasing hypochondria made it easier to face the prospect of an entire year passed in solitude. He had been surprised by the sudden departure of his son Lucien’s preceptor, who without doubt did not care to bury himself in the country for so many months, and so he had come to Clermont. He had studied his mathematics there thirty-five years before, under M. Limasset, the old professor who was my father’s friend. The idea had come to him to ask his old master to recommend an intelligent young man, capable of taking charge of Lucien’s studies for the whole year. M. Limasset naturally thought of me, and I consented, for the reasons which I have given, to be presented to the marquis as a candidate for the place. In the parlor of one of the hotels on the Place de Jande, I found a man quite tall, very bald, with clear gray eyes in a very red face, who did not even take the trouble to examine me. He begun at once to talk, and he talked all the time, intermingling the details of his health--he was one of the imaginary invalids--with the most lively criticisms on modern education. I can hear him now using pellmell phrases which revealed in a way the different phases of his character.