you or I can be."

And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,
of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new edition of
Moliere's _Tartufe_.

"All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon. "I
want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and why you
founded this mass."

"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the tomb; I
may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."

At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to
the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which the
narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the end,
with windows appropriately termed "borrowed lights"--or, in French,
_jours de souffrance_. It was a greenish structure; the ground floor
occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter a
different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his arm with a
vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:

"I lived up there for two years."

"I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day during my
first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of great men! What
then?"

"The mass I have just attended is connected with some events which took
place at the time when I lived in the garret where you say Arthez lived;
the one with the window where the clothes line is hanging with linen
over a pot of flowers. My early life was so hard, my dear Bianchon, that
I may dispute the palm of Paris suffering with any man living. I have
endured everything: hunger and thirst, want of money, want of clothes,
of shoes, of linen, every cruelty that penury can inflict. I have blown
on my frozen fingers in that _pickle-jar of great men_, which I should
like to see again, now, with you. I worked through a whole winter,
seeing my head steam, and perceiving the atmosphere of my own moisture
as we see that of horses on a frosty day. I do not know where a man
finds the fulcrum that enables him to hold out against such a life.

"I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to pay
the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my irascible,
touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood that this
irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the bottom of
the social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I had, as
I may say to yo