had made my uncle promise that I should not become a priest, but I was
as pious as though I had to take orders. On leaving college, the Abbe
Loraux took me into his house and made me study law. During the four
years of study requisite for passing all the examinations, I worked
hard, but chiefly at things outside the arid fields of jurisprudence.
Weaned from literature as I had been at college, where I lived in the
headmaster's house, I had a thirst to quench. As soon as I had read a
few modern masterpieces, the works of all the preceding ages were
greedily swallowed. I became crazy about the theatre, and for a long
time I went every night to the play, though my uncle gave me only a
hundred francs a month. This parsimony, to which the good old man was
compelled by his regard for the poor, had the effect of keeping a
young man's desires within reasonable limits.

"When I went to live with Comte Octave I was not indeed an innocent,
but I thought of my rare escapades as crimes. My uncle was so truly
angelic, and I was so much afraid of grieving him, that in all those
four years I had never spent a night out. The good man would wait till
I came in to go to bed. This maternal care had more power to keep me
within bounds than the sermons and reproaches with which the life of a
young man is diversified in a puritanical home. I was a stranger to
the various circles which make up the world of Paris society; I only
knew some women of the better sort, and none of the inferior class but
those I saw as I walked about, or in the boxes at the play, and then
only from the depths of the pit where I sat. If, at that period, any
one had said to me, 'You will see Canalis, or Camille Maupin,' I
should have felt hot coals in my head and in my bowels. Famous people
were to me as gods, who neither spoke, nor walked, nor ate like other
mortals.