So I flung myself with might and main into conic sections and the
calculus: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without guides or
counselors, face to face for days on end with the abstruse problem
which my stubborn thinking at last stripped of its mysteries. Next
came the physical sciences, studied in the same manner, with an
impossible laboratory, the work of my own hands.

The reader can imagine the fate of my favorite branch of science in
this fierce struggle. At the faintest sign of revolt, I lectured
myself severely, lest I should let myself be seduced by some new
grass, some unknown Beetle. I did violence to my feelings. My
natural history books were sentenced to oblivion, relegated to the
bottom of a trunk.

And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at
Ajaccio College. This time, the temptation is too much for me.
The sea, with its wonders, the beach, whereon the tide casts such
beautiful shells, the maquis of myrtles, arbutus and mastic trees:
all this paradise of gorgeous nature has too much on its side in
the struggle with the sine and the cosine. I succumb. My leisure
time is divided into two parts. One, the larger, is allotted to
mathematics, the foundation of my academical future, as planned by
myself; the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and
looking for the treasures of the sea. What a country and what
magnificent studies to be made, if, unobsessed by x and y, I had
devoted myself wholeheartedly to my inclinations!

We are the wisp of straw, the plaything of the winds. We think
that we are making for a goal deliberately chosen; destiny drives