Instinctively he turned towards a farm, where every morning at dawn, and in all weathers, his father’s servants sent him to get milk.
The farmer’s wife had felt pity for him many times before when he was telling her of his sufferings, and he now remembered something she had one day said to him: “You would be happier as a cowherd.”
He entered the farmhouse, where the farmers were at supper, and, sitting down beside them, he burst into tears. He could not speak.
“Have they driven you from your home?” asked the farmer’s wife. He made a sign: “Yes.” Then the good people tried to console him, made him eat some supper, and put him to sleep on some fresh straw in the stable. They kept him with them, giving him work on the farm by which he earned his food.
The next year, when he was ten years of age, though he looked fourteen, so much had he grown, the cowherd being gone, he replaced him. He did everything in his power to prove his gratitude to those who had sheltered him. Being faithful at his work, devoted to his protectors, and very intelligent, he compensated for his youth by his good will, always on the alert.
The farmer, after the day when Pierre Seron went to him, refused to sell any more milk to Doctor Seron, and later he went bravely to express his indignation to him, thinking to humiliate him when he should hear that his son had become a cowherd.
“So much the better,” replied his father, harshly, “it is probably the only work that he will ever be able to do.”
These words, repeated to Pierre, instead of discouraging him, settled his fate.
“I will also be a Doctor Seron one day,” he swore to himself.
His mother had taught him to read Latin-French in a small, old medical dictionary, which never left him, and by the aid of which he improved his very imperfect knowledge of the conjunction of words.