One of them, having made some gallant pleasantry which I forget, the
smallest and darkest of the three exclaimed, with a slight Gascon
accent,

"What a thing to say! Only physiologists like us have any right to
occupy ourselves about living matter. As for you, Gelis, who only
live in the past--like all your fellow archivists and paleographers--
you will do better to confine yourself to those stone women over
there, who are your contemporaries."

And he pointed to the statues of the Ladies of Ancient France which
towered up, all white, in a half-circle under the trees of the
terrace. This joke, though in itself trifling, enabled me to know
that the young man called Gelis was a student at the Ecole des
Chartes. From the conversation which followed I was able to learn
that his neighbor, blond and wan almost to diaphaneity, taciturn
and sarcastic was Boulmier, a fellow student. Gelis and the future
doctor (I hope he will become one some day) discoursed together
with much fantasy and spirit. In the midst of the loftiest
speculations they would play upon words, and make jokes after the
peculiar fashion of really witty persons--that is to say, in a style
of enormous absurdity. I need hardly say, I suppose, that they only
deigned to maintain the most monstrous kind of paradoxes. They
employed all their powers of imagination to make themselves as
ludicrous as possible, and all their powers of reasoning to assert
the contrary of common sense. All the better for them! I do not
like to see young folks too rational.

The student of medicine, after glancing at the title of the book that