"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears
on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present at
the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die. Stumble, and you
fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim your rights, you will be
crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to rising younger men.

"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe
still less in man. But do not you know in me another Desplein,
altogether different from the Desplein whom every one abuses?--However,
we will not stir that mud-heap.

"Well, I was living in that house, I was working hard to pass my first
examination, and I had no money at all. You know. I had come to one of
those moments of extremity when a man says, 'I will enlist.' I had one
hope. I expected from my home a box full of linen, a present from one of
those old aunts who, knowing nothing of Paris, think of your shirts,
while they imagine that their nephew with thirty francs a month is
eating ortolans. The box arrived while I was at the schools; it had cost
forty francs for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a
loft, had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine
without hitting on any scheme which would release my trunk without the
payment of the forty francs, which of course I could pay as soon as I
should have sold the linen. My stupidity proved to me that surgery was
my only vocation. My good fellow, refined souls, whose powers move in a
lofty atmosphere, have none of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile
in resource and device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent,
things come to them.