of the old school, and very advanced in his political views.  He was the first Republican I had ever seen, and it took me some time to familiarize myself with the idea.  But he was something more than that:  he was a model of charity and self-devotion.  He assured the scientific career of his son by enabling him to devote himself up to the age of thirty to his speculative researches without having to obtain any remunerative post which would have interfered with his studies.  In politics, Berthelot remained true to the principles of his father.  This is the only point upon which we have not always been agreed.  For my part I should willingly resign myself, if the opportunity arose (I must say that it seems to grow more distant every day), to serve, for the greater good of humanity now so sadly out of gear, a tyrant who was philanthropic, well-instructed, intelligent, and liberal.

Our discussions were interminable, and we were always resuming the same subject.  We passed part of the night in searching out together the topics upon which we were engaged.  After some little time, M. Berthelot, having completed his special mathematical studies at the Lycee Henri IV., went back to his father, who lived at the foot of the Tour Saint Jacques de la Boucherie.  When he came to see me in the evening at the Rue de l’Abbe de l’Epee, we used to converse for hours, and then I used to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques.  But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlecock being renewed several times.  Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them.  The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us.  This fateful year was not more successful than we had been in solving the problems which it had set itself, but it demonstrated the fragility of many things which were supposed to be solid, and to young and active minds it seemed like the lowering of a curtain of clouds upon the horizon.

The profound affection which thus bound M. Berthelot and myself together was unquestionably of a very rare and singular kind.  It so happened that we were both of an essentially objective nature; a nature, that is to say, perfectly free from the narrow whirlwind which converts most consciences into an egotistical gulf like the conical cavity of the formica-leo.  Accustomed each to pay very little attention to himself, we paid very little attention to one another.  Our friendship consisted in what we mutually learnt, in a sort of common fermentation which a remarkable conformity of intellectual organization produced in us in regard to the same objects.  Anything which we had both seen in the same light seemed to us a certainty.  When we first became acquainted, I still retained a tender attachment for Christianity.  Berthelot also inherited from his father a remnant of Christian