I bowed.  He glanced toward his daughter.

“Well, sir, I confess to you that I don’t understand—­don’t understand at all—­this behavior of yours.  Why not follow your natural bent?  You youngsters nowadays—­I mean no offence—­you youngsters have no longer any mind of your own.  Take my case; I was seventeen when I began to take an interest in numismatics.  My family destined me for the Stamp Office; yes, sir, the Stamp Office.  I had against me two grandfathers, two grandmothers, my father, my mother, and six uncles—­all furious.  I held out, and that has led me to the Institute.  Hey, Jeanne?”

Mademoiselle Jeanne had returned to the table, where she was standing when I entered, and seemed, after a moment, to busy herself in arranging the books scattered in disarray on the green cloth.  But she had a secret object—­to regain possession of the paper spiral that lay there neglected, its pin sticking up beside the lamp-stand.  Her light hand, hovering hither and thither, had by a series of cunning manoeuvres got the offending object behind a pile of duodecimos, and was now withdrawing it stealthily among the inkstands and paperweights.

M. Charnot interrupted this little stratagem.

She answered very prettily, with a slight toss of the head: 

“But, father, not everybody can be in the Institute.”

“Far from it, Jeanne.  This gentleman, for instance, devotes himself to one method of inking parchment that never will make him my colleague.  Doctor of Laws and Master of Arts,—­I presume, sir, you are going to be a notary?”

“Excuse me, an advocate.”

“I was sure of it.  Jeanne, my dear, in country families it is a standing dilemma; if not a notary, then an advocate; if not an advocate, then a notary.”

M. Charnot spoke with an exasperating half-smile.

I ought to have laughed, to be sure; I ought to have shown sense enough at any rate to hold my tongue and not to answer the gibes of this vindictive man of learning.  Instead, I was stupid enough to be nettled and to lose my head.

“Well,” I retorted, “I must have a paying profession.  That one or another—­what does it matter?  Not everybody can belong to the Institute, as your daughter remarked; not everybody can afford himself the luxury of publishing, at his own expense, works that sell twenty-seven copies or so.”

I expected a thunderbolt, an explosion.  Not a bit of it.  M. Charnot smiled outright with an air of extreme geniality.

“I perceive, sir, that you are given to gossiping with the booksellers.”

“Why, yes, sir, now and then.”

“It’s a very pretty trait, at your age, to be already so strong in bibliography.  You will permit me, nevertheless, to add something to your present stock of notions.  A large sale is one thing to look at, but not the right thing.  Twenty-seven copies of a book, when read by twenty-seven men of intelligence, outweigh a popular success.  Would you believe that one of my friends had no more than eight copies printed of a mathematical treatise?  Three of these he has given away.  The other five are still unsold.  And that man, sir, is the first mathematician in France!”