his brow burned as he pictured this imaginary mother a reality!

Dating from the day at Saint-Cloud, Jean thought himself unhappy,
and unhappy he became in fact. He was wilfully, deliberately
insubordinate, proud of breaking rules and defying punishments.

He and his school-mates attended the classes of a _Lycée_ in
the _Quartier Latin_. Directly he had taken his place on the
remotest bench in the well-warmed lecture-room, he would become
absorbed in some sentimental novel concealed under piles of
Latin and Greek authors. Sometimes the master, short-sighted as
he was, would catch the culprit in the act.

Still, Jean had his hours of triumph. His translations were
remarkable, not for accuracy, but at any rate for elegance. So,
too, his compositions sometimes contained happy phrases that
earned him high praise. On the theme, "The maiden Theano defending
Alcibiades against the incensed Athenians," he wrote a Latin
oration that was warmly commended by Monsieur Duruy, the then
Inspector of Public Instruction, and gained the young author
some weeks of scholastic fame.

On holidays he would roam the boulevards and gaze with greedy
eyes at the jewels, the silks and satins, the bronzes, the
photographs of women, displayed in the shop-windows--the thousand
and one gewgaws and frivolities of fashion that seemed to him
to sum up the necessary conditions of happiness.

His entry into the philosophy class was a red-letter day; he
sported his first tall hat and smoked his first non-surreptitious