At the College of Plassans, while still in the lowest form, Claude
Lantier, Pierre Sandoz, and another lad named Louis Dubuche, had been
three inseparables. Sprung from three different classes of society, by
no means similar in character, but simply born in the same year at a
few months' interval, they had become friends at once and for aye,
impelled thereto by certain secret affinities, the still vague
promptings of a common ambition, the dawning consciousness of
possessing greater intelligence than the set of dunces who maltreated
them. Sandoz's father, a Spaniard, who had taken refuge in France in
consequence of some political disturbances in which he had been mixed
up, had started, near Plassans, a paper mill with new machinery of his
own invention. When he had died, heart-broken by the petty local
jealousy that had sought to hamper him in every way, his widow had
found herself in so involved a position, and burdened with so many
tangled law suits, that the whole of her remaining means were
swallowed up. She was a native of Burgundy. Yielding to her hatred of
the Provencals, and laying at their door even the slow paralysis from
which she was suffering, she removed to Paris with her son, who then
supported her out of a meagre clerk's salary, he himself haunted by
the vision of literary glory. As for Dubuche, he was the son of a
baker of Plassans. Pushed by his mother, a covetous and ambitious
woman, he had joined his friends in Paris later on. He was attending
the courses at the School of Arts as a pupil architect, living as best
he might upon the last five-franc pieces that his parents staked on
his chances, with the obstinacy of usurers discounting the future at
the rate of a hundred per cent.

'Dash it!' at last exclaimed Sandoz, breaking the intense silence that
hung upon the room. 'This position isn't at all easy; my wrist feels