The books themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He
had not the type of mind that could have read them with profit nor
could he understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the
contrary, a man with the habit of study, with the acquired faculty
of learning from books, read those works with enormous profit, kept
their precepts in mind, critically set off those of one master
against those of another, and made for himself a choice which he
proceeded to put into practice.
At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his
assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force,
a man in a bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if
he were to escape defeat.
"I said from the first," he told him one day, "that Nature designed
you for a swordsman. See how justified I was, and see also how well
I have known how to mould the material with which Nature has
equipped you."
"To the master be the glory," said Andre-Louis.
His relations with M. des Amis had meanwhile become of the
friendliest, and he was now beginning to receive from him other
pupils than mere beginners.
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