“I have only one thing to ask you, Monsieur Mouillard.”

“Further respite, I suppose?  Time to reflect and fool me again?  No, a hundred times no!  I’ve had enough of you; a fortnight, not a day more!”

“No, sir; I do not ask for respite.”

“So much the better, for I should refuse it.  What do you want?”

“Monsieur Mouillard, I trust that Jeanne was not present at the interview, that she heard none of it, that she was not forced to blush—­”

My uncle sprang to his feet, seized his gloves, which lay spread out on the table, bundled them up, flung them passionately into his hat, clapped the whole on his head, and made for the door with angry strides.

I followed him; he never looked back, never made answer to my “Good-by, uncle.”  But, at the sixth step, just before turning the corner, he raised his stick, gave the banisters a blow fit to break them, and went on his way downstairs exclaiming: 

“Damnation!”

May 20th.

And so we have parted with an oath, my uncle and I!  That is how I have broken with the only relative I possess.  It is now ten days since then.  I now have five left in which to mend the broken thread of the family tradition, and become a lawyer.  But nothing points to such conversion.  On the contrary, I feel relieved of a heavy weight, pleased to be free, to have no profession.  I feel the thrill of pleasure that a fugitive from justice feels on clearing the frontier.  Perhaps I was meant for a different course of life than the one I was forced to follow.  As a child I was brought up to worship the Mouillard practice, with the fixed idea that this profession alone could suit me; heir apparent to a lawyer’s stool—­born to it, brought up to it, without any idea, at any rate for a long time, that I could possibly free myself from the traditions of the law’s sacred jargon.

I have quite got over that now.  The courts, where I have been a frequent spectator, seem to me full of talented men who fine down and belittle their talents in the practice of law.  Nothing uses up the nobler virtues more quickly than a practice at the bar.  Generosity, enthusiasm, sensibility, true and ready sympathy—­all are taken, leaving the man, in many instances nothing but a skilful actor, who apes all the emotions while feeling none.  And the comedy is none the less repugnant to me because it is played through with a solemn face, and the actors are richly recompensed.

Lampron is not like this.  He has given play to all the noble qualities of his nature.  I envy him.  I admire his disinterestedness, his broad views of life, his faith in good in spite of evil, his belief in poetry in spite of prose, his unspoiled capacity for receiving new impressions and illusions—­a capacity which, amid the crowds that grow old in mind before they are old in body, keeps him still young and boyish.  I think I might have been devoted to his profession, or to literature, or to anything but law.