Nevertheless, it is true that he passed through many dark and painful hours at that period. But in the end “the good fortune that never deserts the valiant” opened the doors of the Normal College of Avignon for him. Having ventured to face the examination for a bursary, he won the latter with the greatest ease. There he found a first refuge from the uncertainties of the morrow, although he had not yet achieved his ideal, nor even that place in the sun which he was striving to prepare for himself. Imagine “between four high walls a courtyard, a sort of bear-pit in which the scholars contend for room beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; and opening on to it, on every side, the class-rooms, like so many cages for wild beasts, devoid of daylight or air.” This was the Normal College of Vaucluse. The description recalls, in some respects, that which was given by a sometime pupil of the Normal College of Paris, M. René Doumic, on taking his seat in the Academy, in the place of Gaston Boissier: “I loved the Normal College, and I am still faithful in my attachment to it. I hope my recollections of it will not be thought lacking in piety if I state that the building in which they penned us up, young fellows of twenty, was the most dismal place that I have ever seen anywhere. This extraordinary building, by an architectural prodigy which I will not attempt to explain, turned all four sides to the north. In three years I do not think I ever saw a single ray of sunlight enter our lecture-rooms or the cloisters in which we used to wander like so many shades. A mournful daylight expired upon the grey, grimy walls. In short, it was not a cheerful place. But at Boissier’s lectures all became bright, full of animation and renewed life. It was a sudden metamorphoses.” At the Normal College of Vaucluse it was not the lectures given by the masters that transformed the abode of shades or the bears’ cage into a centre of light and life for the budding biologist. It was something better than that. By good fortune the director of the College was broad-minded enough to allow him to employ in his own fashion all the time that was left to him after he had prepared his lessons and his exercises. We may imagine that he did not loiter over his classics. The school programme, for that matter, was not very heavy; the orthographic difficulties which complicated most of the exercises of the future schoolmasters were mere play to the ex-Latinist of the Rodez lycée. And “while all around him dictated passages were being minutely scanned with much searching of the dictionary, he examined, in the secrecy of his desk, the fruit of the oleander, the flower of the snapdragon, the sting of a Wasp, the wing-cover of a gardener-beetle.” Thus he treated himself to a lecture of his own fashion whose charm and fascination greatly exceeded that of anything that the college could teach him.