Luxembourg gardens, in _grisettes'_ rooms, even in the law schools
--anywhere rather than in their horrible rooms--horrible for purposes
of study, delightful as soon as they were used for gossiping and
smoking in. Put a cloth on the table, and the impromptu dinner sent
in from the best eating-house in the neighborhood--places for four
--two of them in petticoats--show a lithograph of this "Interior"
to the veriest bigot, and she will be bound to smile.

We thought only of amusing ourselves. The reason for our dissipation
lay in the most serious facts of the politics of the time. Juste and I
could not see any room for us in the two professions our parents
wished us to take up. There are a hundred doctors, a hundred lawyers,
for one that is wanted. The crowd is choking these two paths which are
supposed to lead to fortune, but which are merely two arenas; men kill
each other there, fighting, not indeed with swords or fire-arms, but
with intrigue and calumny, with tremendous toil, campaigns in the
sphere of the intellect as murderous as those in Italy were to the
soldiers of the Republic. In these days, when everything is an
intellectual competition, a man must be able to sit forty-eight hours
on end in his chair before a table, as a General could remain for two
days on horseback and in his saddle.

The throng of aspirants has necessitated a division of the Faculty of
Medicine into categories. There is the physician who writes and the
physician who practises, the political physician, and the physician
militant--four different ways of being a physician, four classes
already filled up. As to the fifth class, that of physicians who sell
remedies, there is such a competition that they fight each other with
disgusting advertisements on the walls of Paris.