Stumble, and you
fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will be
crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.
"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe
still less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein,
altogether different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?--However,
we will not stir that mud-heap.
"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my first
examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come to one of
those moments of extremity when a man says, 'I will enlist.' I had one
hope. I expected from my home a box full of linen, a present from one of
those old aunts who, knowing nothing of Paris, think of your shirts,
while they imagine that their nephew with thirty francs a month is
eating ortolans. The box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost
forty francs for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a
loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine
without hitting on any scheme which would release my trunk without the
payment of the forty francs, which of course I could pay as soon as I
should have sold the linen. My stupidity proved to me that surgery was
my only vocation.
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