"As we were not rich, it was proposed to make a doctor of me, and so I was duly matriculated at the Ecole de Médecine, and commenced my studies there, not with much enthusiasm or industry either; but in the vague hope, nevertheless, that I might some day cut a figure and have my portrait hung among the full lengths of Ambrose Paré, Maréchal, La Peyronnie, and others in the school. "I look back with no small repugnance to the daily tasks I performed there, and to the horrors of the dissecting-room, after boyish curiosity grew satiated. My brain became addled by lectures on the maxillary sinus, on diseases of the stomach, of the pylorus, the hepatic and abdominal viscera; elephantiasis, aortic aneurism, the lacteal and glandular system, and Heaven alone knows all what more, till I imagined that I had alternately in my own person every ailment peculiar to man. We had plenty of subjects, for daily the guillotine was slicing away in the Place de la Grève, and I have seen the loveliest women and the noblest men in France laid on those tables to be stripped and dissected by the knife of the demonstrator. "I was soon voted the worst if not the most stupid student that ever put his foot within the college walls. The professors were in despair. They could make nothing of me; and to muddle my poor brain more, about this time I must needs fall in love. Ah! I perceive that you now become interested. I was not much over seventeen, and my first love----" "First?" said Quentin. "_Oui--ma foi!_ I have had a dozen--was Madame Lisette Thiebault, a friend of my mother." "A widow, of course?" "Not at all. She was unfortunately the wife of one of our doctors in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine;" replied the _étourdi_ young Frenchman. "Married!" said poor Quentin, somewhat aghast. "_Peste!_ of course she was; but we don't care for such little obstacles in Paris. Well, Lisette, for so I must name her, was nearly ten years my senior, and so had what she called a motherly interest in me. She was a very handsome woman, somewhat inclined to _embonpoint_, with a clear pale complexion and laughing eyes, exactly the colour of her hair, which was a rich deep brown. She was always gay, laughing and smiling, except when her husband, the doctor, was present, and one could no more make fun with him, than with old Bébé." "Who, or what was he?" "The mummy of the King of Poland's dwarf--_Ouf!_ what a horror it is!--which we have in the School of the Faculty at Paris. Lisette was very fond of me, and, being a little addicted to literature--she was fond of poetry, too--so we read much together.