myself be seduced by some new grass, some
unknown Beetle. I did violence to my feelings. My natural history books
were sentenced to oblivion, relegated to the bottom of a trunk.

And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at Ajaccio
College. This time, the temptation is too much for me. The sea, with its
wonders, the beach, whereon the tide casts such beautiful shells,
the maquis of myrtles, arbutus and mastic trees: all this paradise of
gorgeous nature has too much on its side in the struggle with the sine
and the cosine. I succumb. My leisure time is divided into two parts.
One, the larger, is allotted to mathematics, the foundation of my
academical future, as planned by myself; the other is spent, with much
misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea. What
a country and what magnificent studies to be made, if, unobsessed by x
and y, I had devoted myself wholeheartedly to my inclinations!

We are the wisp of straw, the plaything of the winds. We think that we
are making for a goal deliberately chosen; destiny drives us towards
another. Mathematics, the exaggerated preoccupation of my youth, did
me hardly any service; and animals, which I avoided as much as ever I
could, are the consolation of my old age. Nevertheless, I bear no
grudge against the sine and the cosine, which I continue to hold in high
esteem. They cost me many a pallid hour at one time, but they always
afforded me some first rate entertainment: they still do so, when my
head lies tossing sleeplessly on its pillow.

Meanwhile, Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist,
Requien by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had
long been botanizing all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens
and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I
accompanied him in my free time on his explorations and never did the
master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was
not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector. Very few
would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the
name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a
pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all.
The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring
memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of
things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the
domain of bo