The woman was tenacious; for what will not a mother's heart
brave? what will it not endure? Those natures which are gentle as water
are yet deep and changeless as the ocean. Of course the wife carried her
point. Who can resist a mother struggling for her son? The boy was
placed as copying-clerk in an attorney's office. All the world over, the
law is the highway to literature. The lad, however, was uneducated; he
wrote well, and this was enough to enable him to copy the law-papers of
the office, but he was ignorant of the first elements of grammar, and
his language, although far better than that of the lads of his class in
life, was shocking to polite ears. It could not well be otherwise, as
his only school was a petty public primary school, and he was but
fourteen years old when his father ordered him to begin to earn his
daily bread. But he was not only endowed with a literary instinct, he
had, too, that obstinate perseverance which would, as one of his friends
said of him, "have enabled him to learn to read by looking at the signs
in the streets, and to cipher by glancing at the numbers on the houses."
Murger always attributed a great deal of influence upon his life to the
accident which had given his father artists for tenants.
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