could wish for. The proud possessor of six
francs--meant to last for the term--felt that the contents of the
whole shop were at his disposal. Saturday night was passed in anxious
yet rapturous calculations, and the responses at Mass during that
happy Sunday morning mingled themselves with thoughts of the glorious
time coming in the afternoon. Next Sunday was not quite so delightful,
as probably there were only a few sous left, and possibly some of the
purchases were broken, or had not turned out quite satisfactorily.
Then, too, there was a long vista of Sundays in the future, without
any possibility of shopping; but after all a certain amount of
compounding is always necessary in life, and an intense short joy is
worth a grey time before and after.

When Balzac was fourteen years old, his life at the college came
suddenly to an end, as, to the alarm of his masters, he was attacked
by coma with feverish symptoms, and they begged his parents to take
him home at once. It is curious to notice that the Fathers make no
reference to this failure in their educational system in the school
record, where there is no reason given for Honore's departure from
school. Certainly his life at Vendome was not very healthy, as
sometimes for idleness, inattention, or impertinence he was for months
shut up every day in a niche six feet square, with a wooden door
pierced by holes to let in air. When Champfleury visited the college
years afterwards, the only person who remembered Balzac was the old
Father who had charge of these cells, and he spoke of the boy's "great
black eyes." Confinement in these _culottes de bois_, as they were
called, was much dreaded by the boys, and the punishment seems
barbarous and senseless, except from the point of view of getting rid
of troublesome pupils. Balzac, however, welcomed the relief from
ordinary school life, and indeed manoeuvred to be shut up. In the
cells he had leisure to dream as he pleased, he was free from the
drudgery of learning his lessons, and he managed to secrete books in
his cage, and thus to absorb the contents of most of the volumes in
the fine library collected by the learned Oratorian founders of the
college. The ideas in many of the learned tomes were far beyond his
age, but he understood them, remembered them afterwards, and could
recall in later years not only the thought in each book, but also the
disposition of his mind when he read them. Naturally this precocity of
intellect cau