estion, which was the sum of his reflections.

"O dear Victor!" she cried. "Why do you doubt me? Have I deserved it? The
past, the present, do they not assure the future?"

He shook his head.

"The man you have loved, whom you love, has never shown himself to you as
he really is. In spite of the trials and sorrows of his life he has been
able to answer your smile with a smile, because, cruel as his life was,
he was sustained by hope and confidence; in Auvergne there will be no
more hope or confidence, but the madness of a broken life, and the
dejection of impotence. What sort of man should I be? Could you love such
a man?"

"A thousand times more, for he would be unhappy, and I should have to
comfort him."

"Would you have the strength to do it? After a time you would become
weary, for the burden would be too heavy, however great your devotion or
profound your tenderness, to see my real position and my hopes, and,
descending into the future, to see my ruin. You know I am ambitious
without having ever compassed the scope of this ambition, and of the
hopes, dreams if you like, on which it rests. Understand that these
dreams are on the eve of being realized; two months more, and in December
or January I pass the 'concours' for the central bureau, which will make
me a physician of the hospitals, and at the same time the one for the
admission, which opens the Faculty of Medicine to me. Without pride, I
believe myself in a position to succeed--what sportsmen call 'in
condition.' And just when I have only a few days to wait, behold me
ruined forever."

"Why forever?"

"A man leaves his village for Paris to make a name for himself, and he
returns only when bad luck or inability sends him back. And then it is
only every four years that there is a 'concours' for admission. In four
years what will be my moral and intellectual condition? How should I
support this exile of four years? Imagine the effect that four years of
isolation in the mountains will produce. But this is not all. Besides
this ostensible end that I have pursued since I left my village, I have
my special work that I can carry out only in Paris. Without having
overwhelmed you with the details of medicine, you know that it is about
to undergo a revolution that will transform it. Until now it has been
taught officially, in pathology, that the human organism carries within
itself the germ of a great many infectious diseases which develop
spontaneously in certa