belief.  A few months sufficed to relegate these vestiges of faith to that part of our souls reserved for memory.  The statement that everything in the world is of the same colour, that there is no special supernatural or momentary revelation, impressed itself upon our minds as unanswerable.  The scientific purview of a universe in which there is no appreciable trace of any free will superior to that of man became, from the first months of 1846, the immovable anchor from which we never shifted.  We shall never move from this position until we shall have encountered in nature some one specially intentional fact having its cause outside the free will of man or the spontaneous action of the animal.

Thus our friendship was somewhat analogous to that of two eyes when they look steadily at the same object, and when from two images the brain receives one and the same perception.  Our intellectual growth was like the phenomenon which occurs through a sort of action due to close contact and to passive complicity.  M. Berthelot looked as favourably upon what I did as myself; I liked his ways as much as he could have done himself.  There was never so much as a trivial vulgarity—­I will not say a moral slackening of affection—­between us.  We were invariably upon the same terms with each other that people are with a woman for whom they feel respect.  When I want to typify what an unexampled pair of friends we were, I always represent two priests in their surplices walking arm in arm.  This dress does not debar them from discussing elevated subjects; but it would never occur to them in such a dress to smoke a cigar, to talk about trifles, or to satisfy the most legitimate requirements of the body.  Flaubert, the novelist, could never understand that, as Sainte-Beuve relates, the recluses of Port Royal lived for years in the same house and addressed each other as Monsieur to the day of their death.  The fact of the matter is that Flaubert had no sort of idea as to what abstract natures are.  Not only did nothing approaching to a familiarity ever pass between us, but we should have hesitated to ask each other for help, or almost for advice.  To ask a service would, in our view, be an act of corruption, an injustice towards the rest of the human race; it would, at all events, be tantamount to acknowledging that there was something to which we attached a value.  But we are so well aware that the temporal order of things is vain, empty, hollow, and frivolous, that we hesitate at giving a tangible shape even to friendship.  We have too much regard for each other to be guilty of a weakness towards each other.  Both alike convinced of the insignificance of human affairs, and possessed of the same aspirations for what is eternal, we could not bring ourselves to admit having of a set purpose concentrated our thoughts upon what is casual and accidental.  For there can be no doubt that ordinary friendship presupposes the conviction that all things are not vain and empty.