the end I felt myself beaten, and resigned myself to the fate I had despised. I entered for a scholarship in history, asking for Bordeaux. And I bade farewell to Paris. 

 The Consultative Committee of Public Education, whose duty it is to decide in these matters, usually met at the beginning of October. I spent the intervening two months at a fishing village in the Landes, at the house of an old curé (it sounds dull, but it's true), who opened his poor house to me in memory of my parents, whom he had known. 

 It was there, my friend, that I passed the most peaceful days of my life. I was free to roam at will through the great woods of the district, with no other appointments beyond meal-times. For the first time my reading was confined to such things as did not figure in an examination syllabus or the annual competition, and my mind could take in undistracted the glorious miracle of the dying season. 

 The curé's house was at one end of a small lake which communicated with the sea through a narrow channel choked with aquatic plants. In the morning the roar of the tide woke me in my open room. From my window I would watch the irresistible advance of the great green ocean under a pink and grey sky. Wild duck and curlew wheeled overhead with their plaintive cries. What a temptation to stay there for ever! To watch the calm passage of the seasons. To be free from social ties, official routine, or any link with life. To spend all day and every day on the long straight dunes, where the great waves roll up ceaselessly in the wind and the jelly-fish thrown up high and dry on the silvery sand look for all the world like amethyst pendants. 

 Then one October morning came two letters, one from the Bordeaux Academy which announced that the Consultative Committee "regretted they had been unable to give favourable consideration to my application for a post." The other was signed by Monsieur Thierry, Professor of Germanic Language and Literature at the Sorbonne. This good man and conscientious scholar had been my tutor for a year, and he it was who had corrected the thesis I submitted in July for my licence—on "Clausewitz and France," of all things. I had never had anything but praise for him. I knew he cherished friendly feelings for me and possibly reproached himself somewhat. He was on the Committee and his letter was an endeavour to justify the decision. Personally he had done what he could, but some of the members had expressed doubts as to my suitability for the teaching profession, and on this point even he himself had to confess he spoke without much conviction. 

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