It was a fine courage that drove me full tilt into a province which I had not yet thought of entering. My twenty-year-old confidence was an incomparable lever. 'Very well,' I replied. 'Come the day after tomorrow, at five, and we'll begin.' This twenty-four hours' delay concealed a plan. It secured me the respite of a day, the blessed Thursday, which would give me time to collect my forces. Thursday comes. The sky is gray and cold. In this horrid weather, a grate well filled with coke has its charms. Let's warm ourselves and think. Well, my boy, you've landed yourself in a nice predicament! How will you manage tomorrow? With a book, plodding all through the night, if necessary, you might scrape up something resembling a lesson, just enough to fill the dread hour more or less. Then you could see about the next: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. But you haven't the book. And it's no use running out to the bookshop. Algebraical treatises are not current wares. You'll have to send for one, which will take a fortnight at least. And I've promised for tomorrow, for tomorrow certain! Another argument and one that admits of no reply: funds are low; my last pecuniary resources lie in the corner of a drawer. I count the money: it amounts to twelve sous, which is not enough. Must I cry off? Rather not! One resource suggests itself: a highly improper one, I admit, not far removed indeed from larceny. O quiet paths of algebra, you are my excuse for this venial sin! Let me confess the temporary embezzlement. Life at my college is more or less cloistered. In return for a modest payment, most of us masters are lodged in the building; and we take our meals at the principal's table. The science master, who is the big gun of the staff and lives in the town, has nevertheless, like ourselves, his own two cells, in addition to a balcony, or leads, where the chemical preparations give forth their suffocating gases in the open air. For this reason, he finds it more convenient to hold his class here during the greater part of the year. The boys come to these rooms in winter, in front of a grate stuffed full of coke, like mine, and there find a blackboard, a pneumatic trough, a mantelpiece covered with glass receivers, panoplies of bent tubes on the walls, and, lastly, a certain cupboard in which I remember seeing a row of books, the oracles consulted by the master in the course of his lessons. 'Among those books,' said I to myself, 'there is sure to be one on algebra. To ask the owner for the loan of it does not appeal to me. My amiable colleague would receive me superciliously and laugh at my ambitious aims. I am sure he would refuse my request.' The future was to show that my distrust was justified. Narrow mindedness and petty jealousy prevail everywhere alike.