102 ESSAYS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CHEMICAL 



Berthelot mere, was able to look behind him without turn- 

 ing his head), and the Court took part. The spectators, 

 under the penalty of sacrilege, were obliged to kneel as 

 the Corpus Christi procession passed. Those who refused 

 were prosecuted and severely punished. 



Such a travesty of religion was not to Dr. Berthelot's 

 taste ; the bourgeoisie was liberal and imbued with the 

 sentiments of Voltaire; and the Berthelot family was of 

 the bourgeois class. During the revolutions of 1830 and 

 1848, their house commanded a full view of one of the 

 chief scenes of operation, and young Berthelot must have 

 often been a spectator of many a scene of disturbance and 

 violence. Highly developed intellectually, and mentally 

 impressionable, his later convictions were doubtless largely 

 owing to his early surroundings. 



That Marcellin resembled his mother in features has 

 already been mentioned. But the resemblance was not 

 merely external; there existed between them the most 

 intimate sympathy. Their favourite promenade was in 

 the Bishop's garden behind Notre Dame, along the Quays 

 with their stalls of flowers, and in the Jardin des Plantes. 

 Their minds were both quick and versatile; they were 

 eagerly interested in all that passed around them, and, as 

 Madame Berthelot used to say (borrowing the simile from 

 one of the invasions which she witnessed), they could both 

 ' drive a Russian team with a sure hand and at a full 

 gallop.' The writer, who knew Berthelot only during his 

 later years since 1878 never conversed with any one 

 who possessed such rapidity of thought. Given an idea, 

 with his quick discursive mind he would follow out all 

 possible paths and by-ways, seeing the consequences of 

 this assumption and of that, interposing occasionally a 

 quaint remark, not exactly humorous, but de plaisanterie. 

 He was a delightful conversationalist, interested and in- 

 tensely interesting, willing to discuss all possible subjects, 



