Destouches died in 1726, when his son was nine years old. He left the boy twelve hundred livres, and commended him to the care of his relatives. Through them, at the age of twelve, Jean Baptiste received the great favour of being admitted to the College of the Four Nations, founded by Mazarin, and in 1729 the most exclusive school in France. Fortunately for its new scholar it was something besides fashionable, and did its best to satisfy his extraordinary thirst for knowledge. His teachers were all priests and Jansenists, and nourished their apt scholar on Jansenist literature, imbuing him with the fashionable theories of Descartes. How soon was it that they began to hope and dream that in the gentle student called Lerond, living on a narrow pittance above a tradesman’s shop, they had found a new Pascal, a mighty enemy of the Archfiend Jesuitism? But beneath his timid and modest exterior there lay already an intellect of marvellous strength and clearness, a relentless logic that tested and weighed every principle instilled in him, every theory masquerading as a fact. He quickly became equally hostile to both Jesuit and Jansenist. It was at school that he learnt to hate with an undying hatred, religion--the religion that in forty years launched, on account of the Bull Unigenitus, forty thousand _lettres de cachet_, that made men forget not only their Christianity but their humanity, and give themselves over body and soul to the devouring fever called fanaticism. At school also he conceived his passion for mathematics, that love of exact truth which no Jansenist priest, however subtle, could make him regard as a dangerous error. When he was eighteen, in 1735, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts and changed his name. D’Alembert is thought to be an anagram on Baptiste Lerond. Anagrams were fashionable, and one Arouet, who had elected to be called Voltaire, had made such an alteration of good omen. D’Alembert went on studying at the College, but throughout his studies mathematics were wooing him from all other pursuits. The taste, however, was so unlucrative, and the income from twelve hundred livres so small, that a profession became a necessity. The young man conscientiously qualified for a barrister. But ‘he loved only good causes’ and was naturally shy. He never appeared at the Bar. Then he bethought him of medicine. He would be a doctor! But again and again the siren voice of his dominant taste called him back to her. His friends--those omniscient friends always ready to put a spoke in the wheel of genius--entreated him to be practical, to remember his poverty, and to make haste to grow rich. He yielded to them so far that one day he carried all his geometrical books to one of their houses, and went back to the garret at Madame Rousseau’s to study medicine and nothing else in the world. But the geometrical problems disturbed his sleep. ---- One master-passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallowed all the rest.