He went to fetch him to me, and I saw him returning a moment afterwards with a young scholar who appeared to me to be about sixteen or seventeen, with an ill-favored countenance, but with a bright and lively expression, and who came and shook hands with me with very good grace." Scarcely had Francois Arouet left college when he was called upon to choose a career.

"I do not care for any but that of a literary man," exclaimed the young fellow.

"That," said his father, "is the condition of a man who means to be useless to society, to be a charge to his family, and to die of starvation." The study of the law, to which he was obliged to devote himself, completely disgusted the poet, already courted by a few great lords who were amused at his satirical vein; he led an indolent and disorderly life, which drove his father distracted; the latter wanted to get him a place.

"Tell my father," was the young man's reply to the relative commissioned to make the proposal, "that I do not care for a position which can be bought; I shall find a way of getting myself one that costs nothing." "Having but little property when I began life," he wrote to M.d'Argenson, his sometime fellow-pupil, "I had the insolence to think that I should have got a place as well as another, if it were to be obtained by hard work and good will.

I threw myself into the ranks of the fine arts, which always carry with them a certain air of vilification, seeing that they do not make a man king's counsellor in his councils.