"It is very possible. What is your name?"
"Trémoulin."
"By Jove! You were in the same class as I was."
"Ah! Old fellow, I recognized you immediately."
He seemed so pleased, so happy at seeing me, that in an outburst of friendly selfishness, I shook both the hands of my former school-fellow heartily, and felt very pleased at meeting him thus.
For four years Trémoulin had been one of the best and most intimate school friends, one of those whom we are too apt to forget as soon as we leave. In those days he had been a tall, thin fellow, whose head seemed to be too heavy for his body; it was a large, round head, and hung sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, onto his chest. Trémoulin was very clever, however, and had a marvelous aptitude for learning, and had an instinctive intuition for all literary studies, and gained nearly all the prizes in our class.
We were fully convinced at school, that he would turn out a celebrated man, a poet, no doubt, for he wrote verses, and was full of ingeniously sentimental ideas. His father, who kept a chemist's shop near the Panthéon, was not supposed to be very well off, and I had lost sight of him as soon as he had taken his bachelor's degree, and now I naturally asked him what he was doing there.
"I am a planter," he replied.
"Bah! You really plant?"
"And I have my harvest."