title: The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga
author:  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 
description: In <i>The Beggar and the Professor</i>, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie makes the Platter family the nexus of his fascinating exposition of the 16th century. In and of themselves, the Platter men were intriguing fellows; the fact that they were also prolific writers, filling diaries, memoirs, and correspondence with the details of their lives, makes them a godsend to historians. Following the Platters' paper trail, Le Roy Ladurie fashions an engaging portrait of a remarkable family. Thomas Platter Sr., for example, started life as an unlettered shepherd, spent his childhood roaming central Europe in a gang of thieves and panhandlers, and managed to pick up both literacy and a trade in his travels. By turns a printer, landowner, healer, and teacher, Platter was the embodiment of a Renaissance man. His eldest son, Felix, became a well-respected doctor, as did his youngest surviving boy, Thomas Jr.
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  # The Pupil
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Henry James
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
  CHAPTER I
  
  
  CHAPTER II
  
  
  CHAPTER III
  
  
  CHAPTER IV
  
  
  CHAPTER V
  
  
  CHAPTER VI
  
  
  CHAPTER VII
  
  
  CHAPTER VIII
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  
  Scanned and proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
    
  The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such
  
  
  an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a
  
  
  person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the
  
  
  aristocracy. Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his
  
  
  engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in that
  
  
  direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of the large
  
  
  affable lady who sat there drawing a pair of soiled gants de Suede
  
  
  through a fat jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding,
  
  
  repeated over and over everything but the thing he would have liked to
  
  
  hear. He woul