106 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



great seminary had imbued his whole substance, and his anxious 

 love for those from whom his conscience had obliged him to part 

 caused him to declare (with some exaggeration) : "Since I left 

 Saint Sulpice I have done nothing but decline, and yet with but 

 one quarter of a Sulpician's virtues, I have still been, I believe, far 

 above the average." 



Nothing can be harder than to break with the faith of one's 

 youth, with the traditions of one's people, with the ideals of one's 

 teachers. Though Renan had taken no final vows, when he left 

 Saint Sulpice on that fateful October day, he must have felt like 

 an apostate. He was leaving a house which had been for him a 

 second home and found himself alone and poor, without friends 

 (except those he was deserting) , in a cold and indifferent world. 

 Dark days followed, days of solitude and trial, which might have 

 become unendurable but for the clear purpose which guided his 

 mind like a star in the night. Then fate was kind to him. For the 

 next month the hands of a new friend were stretched out to him, 

 and before long they helped and enabled him to evoke a new and 

 greater vision. 



This friend, four years younger than himself, was a student of 

 science, Marcellin Berthelot, who became eventually one of the 

 leading chemists of the century. He was fully Renan's equal both 

 from the intellectual and the moral point of view, and, so to say, 

 his complement in the matter of knowledge. At the time of their 

 meeting, Renan's erudition was already considerable, but was re- 

 stricted to the philosophical, historical and literary disciplines, 

 while Berthelot had devoted most of his attention to the experi- 

 mental sciences. Their political opinions were just as divergent, 

 for Renan was a tory and a monarchist, while his friend was a 

 liberal and a republican (the first republican Renan had ever 

 met!). However, their love of knowledge was equally intense; 

 they were animated by the same idealism, the same respect for hu- 

 man reason; and, though the great tasks to which they had al- 

 ready dedicated their young lives were very different, they were 

 sustained by the same heroic devotion to them. Such a friendship 



