“You express yourself pleasantly, Monsieur Bergeret. Just so did the rhetors talk in Rome when Alaric entered it with his Visigoths. Yet under the terebinth trees of the Esquiline the rhetors of the fifth century let fall thoughts of less vanity. For then Rome was Christian. You are that no longer.” “Monsieur l’abbé,” replied the professor, “be a bishop and not the head of the University.” “It is true, Monsieur Bergeret,” said the priest with a loud laugh, “that if I were head of the University I should forbid you to be a teacher of youth.” “And you would do me a great service. For then I should write in the papers, like M. Jules Lemaître, and who knows whether, like him …” “Well! well! you would not be out of place among the wits. And the French Academy has a partiality for freethinkers.” He spoke and walked away with a firm, straight, heavy tread. M. Bergeret remained alone in the middle of the bench, which was now three-parts covered by shade. The ladybird which had been fluttering its wing-cases on his shoulder for a moment flew away. He began to dream. He was not happy, for he had an acute mind whose points were not always turned outwards, and very often he pricked himself with the needle-points of his own criticism. Anæmic and bilious, he had a very weak digestion and enfeebled senses, which brought him more disgust and suffering than pleasure and happiness. He was reckless in speech, and in unerringness and precision his tactlessness attained the same results as the most practised skill. With cunning art he seized every opportunity of injuring himself. He inspired the majority of people with a natural aversion, and being sociable and inclined to fraternise with his fellows, he suffered from that fact. He had never succeeded in moulding his pupils, and he delivered his lectures on Latin literature in a gloomy, damp, deserted cellar, in which he was buried through the Dean’s burning hatred of him. The University buildings were, however, spacious. Built in 1894, “these new premises,” according to the words of M. Worms-Clavelin at the opening, “testified to the zeal of the government of the Republic for the diffusion of learning.” They boasted an amphitheatre, decorated by M. Léon Glaize with allegorical paintings representing Science and Literature, where M. Compagnon gave his much-belauded lectures on mathematics. The other gownsmen in their red or yellow taught different subjects in handsome, well-lighted rooms. M. Bergeret alone, under the bedel’s ironic glance, had to descend, followed by three students, into a dusky, subterranean hole. There, in the heavy, noisome air, he expounded the _Æneid_ with German scholarship and French subtlety; there, by his literary and moral pessimism, he afflicted M. Roux, of Bordeaux, his best pupil; there, he opened up new vistas, whose aspect was terrifying; there, one evening he pronounced those words now become famous, but which ought