would be a disgrace to his family. He himself felt the precariousness
of his present situation, and in consequence became taciturn, since he
could not communicate to the others his own unwavering faith in the
future, and he was forced to admit that, at the age of twenty-two, he
had not yet given them any earnest of future success.

In order to demonstrate that it is not impossible to live by
literature, and more especially for the sake of establishing his
material independence, he was ready to accept any sort of a task
whatever. And all the more so, since his mother had not given up hope
of making him accept one of those fine careers in which an industrious
young fellow may win esteem and fortune. The "spectre of the daily
grind" stared him in the face, and although he had escaped a notary's
career, through the death of the man to whose practice he was to have
succeeded, they gave him to understand that the sombre portals of a
government position might open to him.

"Count me among the dead," he wrote to his sister Laure, who, since her
marriage, had resided at Bayeux, "if they clap that extinguisher over
me. I should turn into a trick horse, who does his thirty or forty
rounds per hour, and eats, drinks and sleeps at the appointed moment.
And they call that living!--that mechanical rotation, that perpetual
recurrence of the same thing!"

In spite of a few short trips, and occasional brief sojourns in Paris,
in the one foothold which his father had retained there, he was
constrained by necessity to remain beneath the family roof-tree. They
gave him his food and his clothing, but no money. He suffered from
this, and groaned and grumbled as if he were in a state of slavery.
Nevertheless, his unquenchable good humour and his determination to