no preparation to serve her valiantly as a man
might, as soon as she answered his appeal. He had the advantage of
several years of opposing to the excitements of his age and of an opulent
life the austere meditations of the poor student.

During that period of ardent, laborious youth, he faithfully shut himself
up in libraries, attended public lectures, and gave himself a solid
foundation of learning, which sometimes awakened surprise when discovered
under the elegant frivolity of the gay turfman. But while arming himself
for the battle of life, he lost, little by little, what was more
essential than the best weapons-true courage.

In proportion as he followed Truth day by day, she flew before and eluded
him, taking, like an unpleasant vision, the form of the thousand-headed
Chimera.

About the middle of the last century, Paris was so covered with political
and religious ruins, that the most piercing vision could scarcely
distinguish the outlines of the fresh structures of the future. One
could, see that everything was overthrown; but one could not see any
power that was to raise the ruins. Over the confused wrecks and remains
of the Past, the powerful intellectual life of the Present-Progress--the
collision of ideas--the flame of French wit, criticism and the
sciences--threw a brilliant light, which, like the sun of earlier ages,
illuminated the chaos without making it productive. The phenomena of Life
and of Death were commingled in one huge fermentation, in which
everything decomposed and whence nothing seemed to spring up again.

At no period of history, perhaps, has Truth been less simple, more
enveloped in complications; for it seemed that all essential notions of
humanity had been fused in a great furnace, and none had come out whole.

The spectacle is grand; but it troubles profoundly all souls--or at least
those that interest and curiosity do not suffice to fill; which is to
say, nearly all. To disengage from this bubbling chaos one pure religious
moral, one positive social idea, one fixed political creed, were an
enterprise worthy of the most sincere. This should not be beyond the
strength of a man of good intentions; and Louis de Camors might have
accomplished the task had he been aided by better instruction and
guidance.

It is the common misfortune of those just entering life to find in it
less than their ideal. But in this respect Camors was born under a
particularly unfortunate star, for he found i