on these things as upon a spectacle,
and groaned over them, without taking upon ourselves to act.

Juste, whom no one ever sought, and who never sought any one, was, at
five-and-twenty, a great politician, a man with a wonderful aptitude for
apprehending the correlation between remote history and the facts of the
present and of the future. In 1831, he told me exactly what would and
did happen--the murders, the conspiracies, the ascendency of the Jews,
the difficulty of doing anything in France, the scarcity of talent in
the higher circles, and the abundance of intellect in the lowest ranks,
where the finest courage is smothered under cigar ashes.

What was to become of him? His parents wished him to be a doctor. But if
he were a doctor, must he not wait twenty years for a practice? You
know what he did? No? Well, he is a doctor; but he left France, he is in
Asia. At this moment he is perhaps sinking under fatigue in a desert, or
dying of the lashes of a barbarous horde--or perhaps he is some Indian
prince's prime minister.

Action is my vocation. Leaving a civil college at the age of twenty, the
only way for me to enter the army was by enlisting as a common soldier;
so, weary of the dismal outlook that lay before a lawyer, I acquired the
knowledge needed for a sailor. I imitate Juste, and keep out of France,
where men waste, in the struggle to make way, the energy needed for the
noblest works. Follow my example, friends; I am going where a man steers
his destiny as he pleases.

These great resolutions were formed in the little room in the
lodging-house in the Rue Corneille, in spite of our haunting the Bal
Musard, flirting with girls of the town, and leading a careless and
apparently reckless life. Our plans and arguments long floated in the
air.

Marcas, our neighbor, was in some degree the guide who led us to the
margin of the precipice or the torrent, who made us sound it, and showed
us beforehand what our fate would be if we let ourselves fall into it.
It was he who put us on our guard against the time-bargains a man
makes with poverty under the sanction of hope, by accepting precarious
situations whence he fights the battle, carried along by the devious
tide of Paris--that great harlot who takes you up or leaves you
stranded, smiles or turns her back on you with equal readiness, wears
out the strongest will in vexatious waiting, and makes misfortune wait
on chance.

At our first meeting, Marcas, as it we