To his mother.
Paris, March 25, 1832.
. . . .It is true, dear mother, that I am greatly straitened; that I have much less money to spend than I could wish, or even than I need; on the other hand, this makes me work the harder, and keeps me away from distractions which might otherwise tempt me. . . . With reference to my work, however, things are not quite as you suppose, as regards either my stay here or my relations with M. Cuvier.
Certainly, I hope that I should lose neither his good — will nor his protection on leaving here; on the contrary, I am sure that he would be the first to advise me to accept any professorship, or any place which might be advantageous for me, however removed from my present occupations, and that his counsels would follow me there.
But what cannot follow me, and what I owe quite as much to him, is the privilege of examining all the collections.
These I can have nowhere but in Paris, since even if he would consent to it I could not carry away with me a hundred quintals of fossil fish, which, for the sake of comparison, I must have before my eyes, nor thousands of fish-skeletons, which would alone 