sentences:  As a young man, he aspired to be a naval doctor, and went to study to such an end in Brest.Instead of becoming a naval doctor, he went down a different route towards being a professor, but could not find a fixed post, which made his life rather nomadic.An encounter with Adolphe Orain, a folklorist of Upper Brittany, gave him some direction, and, with the support of Ernest Renan, he managed to obtain from the Minister for State Education the means to go search for old literary texts in Basse-Bretagne.