THE iMASS OF THE ATHEIST. 533 



tred, envy, jealousy, and calumny have raised between me and suc- 

 cess. At Paris, when it is seen that you are ready to put your foot 

 in the stirrup, they pull you back by the skirts of your coat; here 

 one slips the buckle of the saddle-girth in order that you may break 

 your neck by falling; another contrives that your horse shall cast a 

 shoe ; and the least treacherous is he who presents a pistol at your 

 head, sure of not missing you. You have talent enough, my dear 

 boy, to become acquainted before long with the ceaseless and horrible 

 enmity that niediocrity bears towards the man of superior genius. 

 Should you lose twenty-five louis one evening, you will be accused 

 the next day of being a gambler, and your best friends will repeat 

 ihat you lost the night before twenty-five thousand francs. Suffer 

 from a headache, you will pass for a madman. Be a little quick and 

 vivacious, you are unsociable, ready to take offence. If, in order to 

 resist this battalion of pygmies, you call to aid your superior powers, 

 men cry out immediately that you want to devour all, that you take 

 upon you to domineer, to tyrannize ; your good qualities become de- 

 fects, your defects swell into vices. If you have saved some one, it 

 will be asserted that you have killed him. If your patient shows 

 himself again, it will be peremptorily asserted that you have assured 

 the present at the expense of the future. Stumble, you have fallen. 

 Invent, whatever it may be, reclaim your rights, you are a man im- 

 possible to deal with, a man at the top of the ladder, who will not al- 

 low the young aspirants to mount a single round. And so, my good 

 fellow, if I do not believe in God, still less do I believe in men. Do 

 you not know in me a man completely different from the Desplein 

 that all the world slanders ? But let us not dirty our hands in this 

 mass of corruption. I inhabited then this house. I had to work to 

 qualify myself for passing my first examination, and I had not a far- 

 thing. You know I had reached one of those last extremities in 

 which we say to ourselves, / will enlist ! I had still a hope. I ex- 

 pected from the country a trunk full of linen, a present from one of 

 those old aunts, who, knowing nothing of Paris, think of your shirts, 

 imagining that with thirty francs a month their nephews may feast upon 

 ortolans. The trunk arrived while I was at the class. It had cost forty 

 francs for the carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker, living in 

 a sort of wooden cage suspended from the walls, like the portable 

 habitation of Grildrig slung at the girdle of Glundalclitch, had paid 

 this sum, and kept the trunk as a security for the repayment. I loi- 

 tered to and fro in the rue des Fosses St. Germain des Prcs, and in 

 the rue de VEcole de Medecine, without being able to invent a strata- 

 gem which should consigti the trunk to my custody without first re- 

 paying the forty francs, which I should naturally have done, you 

 have no want to be assured, as soon as I had disposed of the linen. 

 My stupidity impressed me with the idea that surgery was my only 

 vocation. My dear friend, delicate natures, whose powers are exer- 

 cised in an elevated sphere, are deficient in this spirit of intrioue, so 

 fertile in resources, so prompt in combining and adapting ; their pro- 

 per good genius is accident ; they seek not, but they fall in with. To 

 be brief, I returned home at night at the same time as my next neigh- 

 bour, a water-carrier, called Bourgeat, a native of St. Flour. We 



