Adore de ses eleves, M. Dupanloup n’etait pas toujours agreable a ces collaborateurs.  On m’a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocese, les choses se passerent de la meme maniere, qu’il fut toujours plus aime de ses laiques que de ses pretres.  Il est certain qu’il ecrasait tout autour de lui.  Mais sa violence meme nous attachait; car nous sentions que nous etions son but unique.  Ce qu’il etait, c’etait un eveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses eleves la somme de ce qu’il pouvait donner, personne ne l’egalait.  Chacun de ses deux cents eleves existait distinct dans sa pensee; il etait pour chacun d’eux l’excitateur toujours present, le motif de vivre et de travailler.  Il croyait au talent et en faisait la base de la foi.  Il repetait souvent que l’homme vaut en proportion de sa faculte d’admirer.  Son admiration n’etait pas toujours assez eclairee par la science; mais elle venait d’une grande chaleur d’ame et d’un coeur vraiment possede de l’amour du beau....  Les defauts de l’education qu’il donnait etaient les defauts meme de son esprit.  Il etait trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique.  On eut dit que ses deux cents eleves etaient destines a etre tous poetes, ecrivains, orateurs.

St. Nicolas was literary.  Issy and St. Sulpice were severely philosophic and scientific, places of “fortes etudes”; and the writer thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant literary education given under Dupanloup.  In one sense it may be so.  They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable knowledge.  He passed, he says, from words to things.  But he is a writer who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup, than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display, and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant.  But his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm.  Of course he thinks them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting of priests:—­