INTRODUCTION ix 



from contact with his mother. In return for a devotion 

 without bounds, the father exacted implicit obedience 

 and the son never disobeyed him. If he felt at times the 

 constraint, which made of him an infant prodigy at the 

 expense of his liberty, he never mentioned it, but spoke 

 often of his father and always with tenderness and 

 veneration. 



He entered college at Aurillac, where, in 1852, he 

 carried off the first prize for Spanish, as one might ex- 

 pect from a son whose father had wandered much in 

 Spain. Every evening he read some pages of Don 

 Quixote with his father, who was the authorized trans- 

 lator for the law courts. Through all his college studies 

 the father kept pace with him, rising at 4 or 5 o'clock in 

 the morning to study over Emile's college lessons. Again 

 in the evenings, the supper finished, the father and son 

 climbed up to the study, lighted the 3-wick lamp, the 

 antique lun, and began the evening's lessons. Once 

 the lessons were well learned, they read some good author 

 from the treasure of old books the scrivener kept in his 

 little library. There were some volumes of the Magasin 

 Pittoresque from which Emile drew his first notions of 

 science, the Letters of Madame de Sevigne", the Memoirs 

 of Saint-Simon, the plays of Racine, a volume of travels 

 in Spain, a little history in two volumes of the Romans 

 in Gaul, and the like. 



While he made excellent progress in his classical studies, 

 he was fortunate in falling under the influence of a good 

 teacher of mathematics and the sciences. Especially 

 in Balard's pupil, Emile Appert, who was at the same 

 time chemist, physicist and geologist, and who knew 

 everything and how to teach everything and turned the 

 boy's mind readily from the classics to science, he found 

 just the friend he needed. 



Studies over, father and son, inseparable still, rambled 



