M. Bergeret was preparing his lesson on the eighth book of the _Æneid_, and he ought to have been devoting himself exclusively to the fascinating details of metre and language. In this task he would have found, if not joy, at any rate mental peace and the priceless balm of spiritual tranquillity. Instead, he had turned his thoughts in another direction: he was musing on the soul, the genius, the outward features of that classic world whose books he spent his life in studying. He had given himself up to the longing to behold with his own eyes those golden shores, that azure sea, those rose-hued mountains, those lovely meadows through which the poet leads his heroes. He was bemoaning himself bitterly that it had never been his lot to visit the shores where once Troy stood, to gaze on the landscape of Virgil, to breathe the air of Italy, of Greece and holy Asia, as Gaston Boissier and Gaston Deschamps had done. The melancholy aspect of his study overwhelmed him and great waves of misery submerged his mind. His sadness was, of course, the fruit of his own folly, for all our real sorrows come from within and are self-caused. We mistakenly believe that they come from outside, but we create them within ourselves from our own personality. So sat M. Bergeret beneath the huge plaster cylinder, manufacturing his own sadness and weariness as he reflected on his narrow, cramped, and dismal life: his wife was a vulgar creature, who had by now lost all her good looks; his daughters, even, had no love for him, and finally the battles of Æneas and Turnus were dull and boring. At last he was aroused from this melancholy train of thought by the arrival of his pupil, M. Roux, who made his appearance in red trousers and a blue coat, for he was still going through his year of military service. “Ha!” said M. Bergeret, “so I see they’ve turned my best Latin scholar into a hero.”