had left. After making many sacrifices to give their son an education
worthy of his birth, his parents did not live to enjoy the fruits of
their efforts, and Gerfaut became an orphan at the time when he had just
finished his law studies. He then abandoned the career of which his
father had dreamed for him, and the possibilities of a red gown bordered
with ermine. A mobile and highly colored imagination, a passionate love
for the arts, and, more than all, some intimacies contracted with men of
letters, decided his vocation and launched him into literature.

The ardent young man, without a murmur or any misgivings, drank to the
very dregs the cup poured out to neophytes in the harsh career of letters
by editors, theatrical managers, and publishers. With some, this course
ends in suicide, but it only cost Gerfaut a portion of his slender
patrimony; he bore this loss like a man who feels that he is strong
enough to repair it. When his plans were once made, he followed them up
with indefatigable perseverance, and became a striking example of the
irresistible power of intelligence united to will-power. Reputation, for
him, lay in the unknown depths of an arid and rocky soil; he was obliged,
in order to reach it, to dig a sort of artesian well. Gerfaut accepted
this heroic labor; he worked day and night for several years, his
forehead, metaphorically, bathed in a painful perspiration alleviated
only by hopes far away. At last the untiring worker's drill struck the
underground spring over which so many noble ones breathlessly bend,
although their thirst is never quenched. At this victorious stroke,
glory burst forth, falling in luminous sparks, making this new name--his
name--flash with a brilliancy too dearly paid for not to be lasting.

At the time of which we speak, Octave had conquered every obstacle in the
literary field. With a versatility of talent which sometimes recalled
Voltaire's "proteanism," he attacked in succession the most difficult