This last resolution was but little less courageous than the first.

Reduced to a pension (_pension alimentaire_) of only 400 francs a year, he attempted to study medicine, and while waiting until he had the time to give to the necessary studies, he worked in the dreary office of a bank.
The meditations, the thoughts and aspirations of a contemplative nature like his, in his hours of work or leisure, in some degree consoled the budding philosopher during this period of uncongenial labor, and when he did have an opportunity of communicating his ideas to his friends, of discussing them, of defending them against objection, the hardships of his workaday life were for the time forgotten.

In his ardor for science all the uncongenial experiences of his life as a bank clerk vanished.
Like many another rising genius in art, literature, or science, his zeal for knowledge and investigation in those days of grinding poverty fed the fires of his genius, and this was the light which throughout his long poverty-stricken life shed a golden lustre on his toilsome existence.

He did not then know that the great Linne, the father of the science he was to illuminate and so greatly to expand, also began life in extreme poverty, and eked out his scanty livelihood by mending over again for his own use the cast-off shoes of his fellow-students.
(Cuvier.) Bourguin[10] tells us that Lamarck's medical course lasted four years, and this period of severe study--for he must have made it such--evidently laid the best possible foundation that Paris could then afford for his after studies.

He seems, however, to have wavered in his intentions of making medicine his life work, for he possessed a decided taste for music.