fingers at statutes and magistrates. There follows an illustrative incident. A gendarme takes him to task for unconventional behavior with a "tender soul" in the Bois de Boulogne. He presents a visiting card which shows him to be a member of the Académie Française. Result: profuse apologies.
As a young man he had entertained grand and austere notions of the scholar's calling, derived from seeing members of the Academy of Inscriptions on dress parade or, after a meeting, turning over some edition of the classics in his father's bookshop by the Seine. His youthful ideal was something like this: "To live with a hobby apart from one's own century in another age, to know hardly anything about one's contemporaries, but to be intimate and familiar with Cicero, Corneille or Mme de Sévigné. That was what fame seemed to me."
"And to-day, Master?" That discreet young man repeats the offensive title. You see that he knows the old man is a bit insincere—really enjoys well enough what he pretends to despise.
"To-day, my son, fame lies in being able to do what I like. I receive ministers and publishers in my dressing gown and slippers. I give audience, and often I refuse it, to them. It's my turn to make them wait, as they often did me."
This is but negative counsel for a young man from the country bent on a career. What advice has our modern sage equivalent to that painstaking and conscientious thought which the great lexicographer gave to young Boswell's reading? Well, Père Anatole appears to believe that the young man may follow his own instincts, so far as his reading goes. "I know," he declares, "the vanity of all human learning. What
