yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into milk; thus my
morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only every other day in a
boarding-house where the meal cost me sixteen sous. You know as well as
I what care I must have taken of my clothes and shoes. I hardly know
whether in later life we feel grief so deep when a colleague plays us
false as we have known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile of a
gaping seam in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I drank
nothing but water; I regarded a cafe with distant respect. Zoppi's
seemed to me a promised land where none but the Lucullus of the _pays
Latin_ had a right of entry. 'Shall I ever take a cup of coffee there
with milk in it?' said I to myself, 'or play a game of dominoes?'

"I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to master
positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value, and
merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from
nothingness. I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during
these endless nights cost me more than food. It was a long duel,
obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere. To
have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a few
sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them where
students congregate? And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can
understand that nothing means _nothing_. When I even thought of revealing
my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes a
sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into the
larynx.

"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having wanted
for anything, had never even heard this problem in the rule of three: A
young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is to X.--These gilded
idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt? Why did you involve