amateur of painting, who had been struck by the little figures
that the urchin had often daubed. And thus for seven years Claude had
remained in the South, at first boarding at the college, and afterwards
living with his protector. The latter, however, was found dead in his
bed one morning. He left the lad a thousand francs a year, with the
faculty of disposing of the principal when he reached the age of
twenty-five. Claude, already seized with a passion for painting,
immediately left school without even attempting to secure a bachelor's
degree, and rushed to Paris whither his friend Sandoz had preceded him.

* Gervaise of 'The Dram Shop'(L'Assommoir).--ED.

At the College of Plassans, while still in the lowest form, Claude
Lantier, Pierre Sandoz, and another lad named Louis Dubuche, had been
three inseparables. Sprung from three different classes of society, by
no means similar in character, but simply born in the same year at a few
months' interval, they had become friends at once and for aye, impelled
thereto by certain secret affinities, the still vague promptings of
a common ambition, the dawning consciousness of possessing greater
intelligence than the set of dunces who maltreated them. Sandoz's
father, a Spaniard, who had taken refuge in France in consequence of
some political disturbances in which he had been mixed up, had started,
near Plassans, a paper mill with new machinery of his own invention.
When he had died, heart-broken by the petty local jealousy that had
sought to hamper him in every way, his widow had found herself in so
involved a position, and burdened with so many tangled law suits, that
the whole of her remaining means were swallowed up. She was a native of
Burgundy. Yielding to her hatred of the Provencals, and laying at their
door even the slow paralysis from which she was suffering, she removed
to Paris with her son, who then supported her out of a meagre clerk's
salary, he himself haunted by the vision of literary glory. As for
Dubuche, he was the son of a baker of Plassans. Pushed by his mother, a
covetous and ambitious woman, he had joined his friends in Paris later
on. He was attending the courses at the School of Arts as a pupil
architect, living as best he might upon the last five-franc pieces
that his parents staked on his chances, with the obstinacy of usurers
discounting the future at the rate of a hundred per cent.

'Dash it!' at last exclaimed Sandoz, breaking the intense silen