of my memory.

Leave the little group of students which gathers about Larrey beneath the
gilded dome of the Invalides and follow me to the Hotel Dieu, where rules
and reigns the master-surgeon of his day, at least so far as Paris and
France are concerned,--the illustrious Baron Dupuytren. No man disputed
his reign, some envied his supremacy. Lisfranc shrugged his shoulders as
he spoke of "ce grand homme de l'autre cots de la riviere," that great
man on the other side of the river, but the great man he remained, until
he bowed before the mandate which none may disobey. "Three times," said
Bouillaud, "did the apoplectic thunderbolt fall on that robust
brain,"--it yielded at last as the old bald cliff that is riven and
crashes down into the valley. I saw him before the first thunderbolt had
descended: a square, solid man, with a high and full-domed head, oracular
in his utterances, indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it was
said, very rough with them. He spoke in low, even tones, with quiet
fluency, and was listened to with that hush of rapt attention which I
have hardly seen in any circle of listeners unless when such men as
ex-President John Quincy Adams or Daniel Webster were the speakers. I do
not think that Dupuytren has left a record which explains his influence,
but in point of fact he dominated those around him in a remarkable
manner. You must have all witnessed something of the same kind. The
personal presence of some men carries command with it, and their accents
silence the crowd around them, when the same words from other lips might
fall comparatively unheeded.

As for Lisfranc, I can say little more of him than that he was a great
drawer of blood and hewer of members. I remember his ordering a
wholesale bleeding of his patients, right and left, whatever might be the
matter with them, one morning when a phlebotomizing fit was on him. I
recollect his regretting the splendid guardsmen of the old Empire,--for
what? because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate. I got along
about as far as that with him, when I ceased to be a follower of M.
Lisfranc.

The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in 1867,
and his many works made his name widely known. Coming to Paris in wooden
shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to great eminence as
a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained the Professorship to
which his talents and learning entitled him. His example may be