At my own inclination, and the advice of Abbe Tresvaux, a pious and learned Breton priest who was vicar-general to M. de Quelen, I chose M. Gosselin for my tutor, and I have retained a most affectionate recollection of him.  No one could have shown more benevolence, cordiality and respect for a young man’s conscience.  He left me in possession of unrestricted liberty.  Recognising the honesty of my character, the purity of my morals and the uprightness of my mind, it never occurred to him for a moment that I could be led to feel doubt upon subjects about which he himself had none.  The great number of young ecclesiastics who had passed through his hands had somewhat weakened his powers of diagnosis.  He classed his students wholesale, and I will, as I proceed, explain how one who was not my tutor read far more clearly into my conscience than he did, or than I did myself.  Two of the other tutors, M. Gottofrey, one of the professors of philosophy, and M. Pinault, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, were in every respect a contrast to M. Gosselin.  The first named, a young priest of about seven and twenty, was, I believe, only half a Frenchman by descent.  He had the bright rosy complexion of a young Englishwoman, with large eyes which had a melancholy candid look.  He was the most extraordinary instance which can be conceived of suicide through mystical orthodoxy.  He would certainly have made, if he had cared to do so, an accomplished man of the world, and I have never known any one who would have been a greater favourite with women.  He had within him an infinite capacity for loving.  He felt that he had been highly gifted in this way; and then he set to work, in a sort of blind fury, to annihilate himself.  It seemed as if he discerned Satan in those graces which God had so liberally bestowed upon him.  He boiled with inward anger at the sight of his own comeliness; he was like a shell within which a puny evil genius was ever busy in crushing the inner pearl.  In the heroic ages of Christianity, he would have sought out the keen agony of martyrdom, but failing that he paid such constant court to death that she, whom alone he loved, embraced him at last.  He went out to Canada, and the cholera which raged at Montreal gave him an excellent opportunity for attaining his end.  He nursed the sick with eager joy and died.

I have always thought that there must have been a hidden romance in the life of M. Gottofrey, and that he had undergone some disappointment in love.  He had perhaps expected too much from it, and finding that it was not boundless, had broken it as he would an idol.  At all events he was not one of those who, knowing how to love have not known how to die.  At times I fancy that I can see him in heaven amid the hosts of rosy-hued angels which Correggio loved to paint:  at others, I imagine that the woman whom he might have taught to love him to distraction is scourging him through all eternity.  Where he was unjust was in making his reason, which was in