A man so careful of details must have assigned a special dress to these special freedmen of his creation; for at Rome even freedom had its livery.  What was this dress?  Was there one at all?  No authority that I know of throws any light on the subject.  Still one hope remains:  M. Flamaran.  He knows so many things, he might even know this.

M. Flamaran comes from the south-Marseilles, I think.  He is not a specialist in Roman law; but he is encyclopedic, which comes to the same thing.  He became known while still young, and deservedly; few lawyers are so clear, so safe, so lucid.  He is an excellent lecturer, and his opinions are in demand.  Yet he owes much of his fame to the works which he has not written.  Our fathers, in their day, used to whisper to one another in the passages of the Law School, “Have you heard the news?  Flamaran is going to bring out the second volume of his great work.  He means to publish his lectures.  He has in the press a treatise which will revolutionize the law of mortgages; he has been working twenty years at it; a masterpiece, I assure you.”  Day follows day; no book appears, no treatise is published, and all the while M. Flamaran grows in reputation.  Strange phenomenon! like the aloe in the Botanical Gardens.  The blossoming of the aloe is an event.  “Only think!” says the gaping public, “a flower which has taken twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty autumns, and twenty winters to make up its mind to open!” And meanwhile the roses bloom unnoticed by the town.  But M. Flamaran’s case is still more strange.  Every year it is whispered that he is about to bloom afresh; he never does bloom; and his reputation flourishes none the less.  People make lists of the books he might have written.  Lucky author!

M. Flamaran is a professor of the old school, stern, and at examination a terror to the candidates.  Clad in cap and gown, he would reject his own son.  Nothing will serve.  Recommendations defeat their object.  An unquestioned Roumanian ancestry, an extraction indisputably Japanese, find no more favor in his eyes than an assumed stammer, a sham deafness, or a convalescent pallor put on for the occasion.  East and west are alike in his sight.  The retired registrar, the pensioned usher aspiring late in life to some petty magistrature, are powerless to touch his heart.  For him in vain does the youthful volunteer allow his uniform to peep out beneath his student’s gown:  he will not profit by the patriotic indulgence he counted on inspiring.  His sayings in the examination-room are famous, and among them are some ghastly pleasantries.  Here is one, addressed to a victim:  “And you, sir, are a law student, while our farmers are in want of hands!”

For my own part I won his favor under circumstances that I never shall forget.  I was in for my first examination.  We were discussing, or rather I was allowing him to lecture on, the law of wardship, and nodding my assent to his learned elucidations.  Suddenly he broke off and asked, “How many opinions have been formulated upon this subject?”