d of a week the poorest youth
from the provinces, awkward and simple as he might be, was envied by
the young millionaire--who, little as he might know it, was paying for
his schooling--if he had turned out some good Latin verses, or written
a clever exercise.

In the year 1838, I was fortunate enough to win all the prizes in my
class at the Treguier College. The _palmares_ happened to be seen by
one of the enlightened men whom M. Dupanloup employed to recruit his
youthful army. My fate was settled in a twinkling, and "Have him sent
for" was the order of the impulsive Superior. I was fifteen and a half
years old, and we had no time to reflect. I was spending the holidays
with a friend in a village near Treguier, and in the afternoon of the
4th of September I was sent for in haste. I remember my returning home
as well as if it was only yesterday. We had a league to travel through
the country. The vesper bell with its soft cadence echoing from
steeple to steeple awoke a sensation of gentle melancholy, the image
of the life which I was about to abandon for ever. The next day I
started for Paris; upon the 7th I beheld sights which were as novel
for me as if I had been suddenly landed in France from Tahiti or
Timbuctoo.

THE PETTY SEMINARY OF SAINT NICHOLAS DU CHARDONNET.

PART III.

No Buddhist Lama or Mussulman Fakir, suddenly translated from Asia to
the Boulevards of Paris, could have been more taken aback than I was
upon being suddenly landed in a place so different from that in which
moved my old Breton priests, who, with their venerable heads all wood
or granite, remind one of the Osirian colossi which in after life
so struck my fancy when I saw them in Egypt, grandiose in their long
lines of immemorial calm. My coming to Paris marked the passage
from one religion to another. There was as much difference between
Christianity as I left it in Brittany and that which I found current
in Paris, as there is between a piece of old cloth, as stiff as a
board, and a bit of fine cambric. It was not the same religion. My old
priests, with their heavy old-fashioned copes, had always seemed to
me like the magi, from whose lips came the eternal truths, whereas
the new religion to which I was introduced was all print and calico, a
piety decked out with ribbons and scented with musk, a devotion which
found expression in tapers and small flower-pots, a young lady's
theology without stay or style, as composite as the polychr