I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners and Professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled with the train of students that attended the morning visits.  See that bent old man who is groping his way through the wards of La Charity.  That is the famous Baron Boyer, author of the great work on surgery in nine volumes, a writer whose clearness of style commends his treatise to general admiration, and makes it a kind of classic.  He slashes away at a terrible rate, they say, when he gets hold of the subject of fistula in its most frequent habitat,—­but I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted to cut a good dollop out of a patient he was examining.  The short, square, substantial man with iron-gray hair, ruddy face, and white apron is Baron Larrey, Napoleon’s favorite surgeon, the most honest man he ever saw,—­it is reputed that he called him.  To go round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo.  Larrey was still strong and sturdy as I saw him, and few portraits remain printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my memory.

Leave the little group of students which gathers about Larrey beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides and follow me to the Hotel Dieu, where rules and reigns the master-surgeon of his day, at least so far as Paris and France are concerned,—­the illustrious Baron Dupuytren.  No man disputed his reign, some envied his supremacy.  Lisfranc shrugged his shoulders as he spoke of “ce grand homme de l’autre cots de la riviere,” that great man on the other side of the river, but the great man he remained, until he bowed before the mandate which none may disobey.  “Three times,” said Bouillaud, “did the apoplectic thunderbolt fall on that robust brain,”—­it yielded at last as the old bald cliff that is riven and crashes down into the valley.  I saw him before the first thunderbolt had descended:  a square, solid man, with a high and full-domed head, oracular in his utterances, indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it was said, very rough with them.  He spoke in low, even tones, with quiet fluency, and was listened to with that hush of rapt attention which I have hardly seen in any circle of listeners unless when such men as ex-President John Quincy Adams or Daniel Webster were the speakers.  I do not think that Dupuytren has left a record which explains his influence, but in point of fact he dominated those around him in a remarkable manner.  You must have all witnessed something of the same kind.  The personal presence of some men carries command with it, and their accents silence the crowd around them, when the same words from other lips might fall comparatively unheeded.