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. My good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a
lofty atmosphere, have none of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile
in resource and device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent,
things come to them.

"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger also
came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-Flour. We
knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off the same landing,
and who hear each other sleeping, coughing, dressing, and so at last
become used to one another. My neighbor informed me that the landlord,
to whom I owed three quarters' rent, had turned me out; I must clear
out next morning. He himself was also turned out on account of his
occupation. I spent the most miserable night of my life. Where was I to
get a messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How
could I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these
unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen repeat their
tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends heavenly slumbers full
of beautiful dreams.

"Next morning, just as I was swallowing my little bowl of bread soaked
in milk, Bourgeat came in and said to me in his vile Auvergne accent:

"'_Mouchieur l'Etudiant_, I am a poor man, a foundling from the hospital
at Saint-Flour, without either father or mother, and not rich enough to
marry. You are not fertile in relations either, nor well supplied with
the ready? Listen, I have a hand-cart downstairs which I have hired for
two sous an hour; it will hold all our goods; if you like, we will try
to find lodgings together, since we are both turned out