Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/33

Rh This sentence increased his popularity with those of his own age, and evoked nothing more than a cutting reprimand from his father.

A serious difference with his father was brought about by Henry's career at the universities of Munich and Würzburg, at which he studied in 1852 and 1853. Letters and art were uppermost in his mind when it came to the choice of a profession, but his father failed to see that, as the Germans put it, “the desire of the heart is the voice of fate,” and advocated a technical training. He accompanied his son to Munich and had him matriculated at the Polytechnicum. After two months of hard work Henry found his tasks there positively repugnant. Instead of advising his father, he then made the mistake of having himself transferred to the University, and devoted himself to lectures by the poet Geibel and by the æsthete and critic Moritz Carriere. The expense of this change of studies, as well as membership in the Franconia, a fashionable student corps, soon ran him into debt, while the corps life itself, with all its attractions, such as duelling, balls, and “Kneip-Abende,” cost him many valuable hours that should have been devoted to his university work. When his father discovered, by accident, the change in his son's mode of life and studies, he ordered him home at once. After much cogitation and much warranted anger, he sent his penitent son to the quieter University of Würzburg, and committed him to a study of the law. Here the subject of this sketch lived quietly and worked hard for some months, but again the old desire for literature and æsthetics, for the study of which he could never gain his father's consent, revived. Gradually the law became more and more distasteful, and his situation was made the more difficult by the necessity of paying off his Munich creditors, who were so ready to trust him when he was a member of the Franconia.

In this emergency he bethought himself of well-to-do relatives at Wachenheim on the Haardt, who loaned him