with eleven hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood
before me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on
while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me,
and whom my mother had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four
hundred francs, spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so
often gaily left for a drive in my childhood.

"'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'

"The good fellow was crying.

"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have
kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut
their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were
very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I
found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed
in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by
nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's
discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and
awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight
whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was
ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be
the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the
voice that cries, 'Courage! Go forward!' in spite of sudden
revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so
much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,--in spite of all