pon my life--imperceptibly at first, and by
gradual degrees; but deeply and surely. To apply myself to the study of
medicine became daily more difficult and more distasteful to me. The
boisterous pleasures of the Quartier Latin lost their charm for me. Day
by day I gave myself up more and more passionately to the cultivation of
my taste for poetry and art. I filled my little sitting-room with casts
after the antique. I bought some good engravings for my walls, and hung
up a copy of the Madonna di San Sisto above the table at which I wrote
and read. All day long, wherever I might be--at the hospital, in the
lecture-room, in the laboratory--I kept looking longingly forward to the
quiet evening by-and-by when, with shaded lamp and curtained window, I
should again take up the studies of the night before.

Thus new aims opened out before me, and my thoughts flowed into channels
ever wider and deeper. Already the first effervescence of youth seemed
to have died off the surface of my life, as the "beaded bubbles" die off
the surface of champagne. I had tried society, and wearied of it. I had
tried Bohemia, and found it almost as empty as the Chaussee d'Autin.
And now that life which from boyhood I had ever looked upon as the
happiest on earth, the life of the student, was mine. Could I have
devoted it wholly and undividedly to those pursuits which were fast
becoming to me as the life of my life, I would not have exchanged my lot
for all the wealth of the Rothschilds. Somewhat indolent, perhaps, by
nature, indifferent to achieve, ambitious only to acquire, I asked
nothing better than a life given up to the worship of all that is
beautiful in art, to the acquisition of knowledge, and to the
development of taste. Would the time ever come when I might realize my
dream? Ah! who could tell? In the meanwhile ... well, in the meanwhile,
here was Paris--here were books, museums, galleries, schools, golden
opportunities which, once past, might never come again. So I reasoned;
so time went on; so I lived, plodding on by day in the Ecole de
Medecine, but, when evening came, resuming my studies at the leaf turned
down the night before, and, like the visionary in "The Pilgrims of the
Rhine," taking up my dream-life at the point where I had been
last awakened.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXVII.

GUICHET THE MODEL.

To the man who lives alone and walks about with his eyes open, the mere
bricks and mortar of a gre