introduced me to some of the verses of De Musset. We go wild over this poet. Dediot's place in the schoolroom is by the side of Scelles, the bookseller's son, whom we call Bel-Œil, because he squints. Bel-Œil is as lazy as a lobster, and Dediot has made the oddest bargain with him. Dediot does all his exercises, and in return for each, Bel-Œil hands over to him a copy of twenty lines of Rolla. In exchange for I know not how many versions, themes, and Latin verses, my friend has at last secured the entire poem, and we spout its most characteristic lines enthusiastically. We have become sceptics and misanthropes. We play at despairing Atheism just as Parizelle and Rocquain play at debauchery, Gervais and others at sport and fashion, politics and love. Old Sorbelle, having been dismissed from the Lycée, has just published a pamphlet in which he figures under the name of Lebros, and the Provost under that of M. Bifteck. This little book occupies our attention throughout the whole winter, and induces us to form a conspiracy which leads to nothing. Here we are, then, playing at revolution! What a strange discipline is that of those infamous schools, where young boys ruin their years of unhappy youth by the puerile and premature imitation of passions from which they will have to suffer in reality some day, just as children, who are destined to die in war as men, play at soldiers, with their flaxen curls and their ringing laughter! Alas! for me the game was over too soon. Nevertheless, this shabby, dull, mean school was my home, the only place in which I felt myself really "at home," and I loved it. Yes, I loved that hulks which was also partly barracks and partly hospital, because there at all events I was not perpetually confronted with the evidence of my double misfortune. After all, the influence of my age made itself felt there, the nervous strain upon me was relaxed, and I escaped from the fixed idea of the murderer of my father to be discovered, and my stepfather to be detested. My half-holidays were such misery to me that they would have made me dread the termination of my school-time, only that I knew the same date would place me in possession of my fortune, enabling me to devote myself entirely to the supreme aim and purpose of my life. I had sworn to myself that the mysterious assassin whom justice had failed to discover should be unearthed by me, and I derived extraordinary moral strength from that resolution, which I kept strictly to myself, without ever speaking of it. This, however, did not prevent me from suffering from trifles, whenever those trifles were signs of my doubly-orphaned state. How clearly present to me now are the torments of those sortie days! When the servant who was to take me to my mother's abode comes to fetch me on those Sunday mornings at eight, his careless manner makes me feel that I am no longer the son of the house. This wretch, this François Niquet, with his shaven chin and his insolent