Nearly all the men with whom I have had anything to do have been extremely kind to me. When I first left the seminary, I traversed, as I have said, a period of solitude, during which my sole support consisted of my sister's letters and my conversations with M. Berthelot; but I soon met with encouragement in every direction. M. Egger became, from the beginning of 1846, my friend and my guide in the difficult task of proving, rather late in the day, what I could do in the way of classics. Eugéne Burnouf, after perusing a very defective essay which I wrote for the Volney Prize in 1847, chose me as a pupil. M. and Mme. Adolphe Garnier were extremely kind to me. They were a charming couple, and Madame Garnier, radiant with grace and devoid of affectation, first inspired me with admiration for a kind of beauty from which theology had sequestered me. With M. Victor Le Clerc I had brought before my eyes all those qualities of study and methodical application which distinguished my former teachers. I had learnt to like him from the time of my residence at St. Sulpice: he was the only layman whom the directors of the seminary valued, and they envied him his remarkable ecclesiastical erudition. M. Cousin, though he more than once displayed friendliness for me, was too closely surrounded by disciples for me to try and force my way through such a crowd, which was somewhat subservient to their master's utterances. M. Augustin Thierry, upon the other hand, was, in the true sense of the word, a spiritual father for me. His advice is ever in my thoughts, and I have him to thank for having kept clear in my style of writing from certain very ungainly defects which I should not have discovered for myself. It was through him that I made the acquaintance of the Scheffer family, whom I have to thank for a companion who has always assorted herself so harmoniously to my somewhat contracted conditions of life that I am at times tempted, when I reflect upon so many fortunate coincidences, to believe in predestination.
According to my philosophy, which regards the world in its entirety as full of a divine afflation, there is no place for individual will in the government of the universe. Individual Providence, in the sense formerly attached to it, has never been proved by any unmistakable fact. But for this, I should assuredly be thankful to yield to a combination of circumstances in which a mind, less subjugated than my own by general reasoning, would detect the traces of the special protection of benevolent deities. The play of chances which brings up a ternion or a quaternion is nothing compared to what has been required to prevent the combination of which I am reaping the fruits from being disturbed. If my origin had been less lowly in the eyes of the world, I should not have entered or persevered upon that royal road of the intellectual life to which my early training for the priesthood attached me. The displacement of a single atom would have broken the chain of fortuitous facts which, in the remote district of Brittany, was preparing me for a privileged life; which brought me from Brittany to Paris; which, when I was in Paris, took me to the establishment of all others where the best and most solid education was to be had; which, when I left the seminary, saved me from two or three mistakes which would have been the ruin of me; which, when I was on my travels, extricated me from certain dangers that, according to the doctrine of chances, would have been fatal to me; which, to cite one special instance, brought Dr. Suquet over from America to rescue me from the jaws of death which were yawning to swallow me up. The only conclusion I would fain draw from all this is that the unconscious effort towards what is good and true in the universe has its throw of the dice through the intermediary of each one of us. There is no combination but what comes up, quaternions like any other. We may disarrange the designs of Providence in respect to ourselves; but we have next to no influence upon their accomplishment. _Quid habes quod non accepisti_? The dogma of grace is the truest of all the Christian dogmas.
