se. There, while they attended the
college, Vincent continued to direct their studies, with such success
that several other noblemen confided their sons to him, and he was
soon at the head of a small school.

To carry on such an establishment and to devote oneself to study at
the same time was not the easiest of tasks; but Vincent was a hard
and conscientious worker, and he seems to have had, even then, a
strange gift of influencing others for good. For seven years he
continued this double task with thorough success, completed his
course of theology, took his degree, and was ordained priest in the
opening years of that seventeenth century which was to be so full of
consequences both for France and for himself.

Up to this time there had been nothing to distinguish Vincent from
any other young student of his day. Those who knew him well respected
him and loved him, and that was all. But with the priesthood came a
change. From thenceforward he was to strike out a definite line of
his own--a line that set him apart from the men of his time and
faintly foreshadowed the Vincent of later days.

The first Mass of a newly ordained priest was usually celebrated with
a certain amount of pomp and ceremony. If a cleric wanted to obtain a
good living it was well to let people know that he was eligible for
it; humility was not a fashionable virtue. People were therefore not
a little astonished when Vincent, flatly refusing to allow any
outsiders to be present, said his first Mass in a lonely little
chapel in a wood near Bajet, beloved by him on account of its
solitude and silence. There, entirely alone save for the acolyte and
server required by the rubrics, and trembling at the thought of his
own unworthiness, the newly made priest, celebrating the great
Sacrifice for the first time, offered himself for life and death to
be the faithful servant of his Lord. So high were his ideals of what
the priestly life should be that in his saintly old age he would
often say that, were he not already a priest, he would never dare to
become one.

Vincent's old friend and patron, M. de Commet, was eager to do a good
turn to the young cleric. He had plenty of influence and succeeded in
getting him named to the rectorship of the important parish of Thil,
close to the town of Dax. This was a piece of good fortune which many
would have envied; but it came to Vincent's ears that there was
another claimant, who declared that the benefice had been p