his thoughts never left
the object of his infatuation, and her image was the only thing
he saw distinctly. He was entranced, possessed; but the feeling
was delicious, and he roamed far and wide in the dark streets,
making long detours by the river-side quays to lengthen out his
reveries, his heart full, overfull of passionate, voluptuous
imaginings. He was content because he was weary; his soul lay
drowned in a delicious languor that no pang of desire troubled;
to look and long was more than sufficient as yet to still the
cravings of his virgin appetites.

He threw himself half dressed on his bed, overjoyed to cherish
the picture of her beauty in his heart. All he wanted was to
lose himself in the enchanted sleep that weighed down his boyish
lids.

On waking, he gazed about him for something--he knew not what.
Was he in love? He could not tell, but there was a void somewhere.
Still, he felt no overmastering impulse, except to read the verses
he had heard the actress declaim. He took down from his shelves
a volume of Corneille and read through Emilie's part. Every line
enchanted him, one as much as another, for did they not all evoke
the same memory for him?

His father and his aunt, with whom he passed his days, had grown
to be only vague, meaningless shapes to him. Their broadest
pleasantries failed to raise a smile, and the coarse realities of
a narrow, penurious existence had no power to disturb his happy
serenity. All day long, in the back-shop where the penetrating
smell of paste mingled with the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he
lived a life of his own, a life of incomparable splendours. His
little Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at every
couplet of Emilie's, was all he needed to foster the fairest
of illusions. A face and the tones of a voice were his world.

In a few days he knew the whole tragedy by heart. He would declaim
the lines in a slow, pompous voice, and his aunt would remark
after each speech, as she shredded the vegetables for dinner:

"So you're for being a _cure_, are you, that you preach like they
do in church?"

But in the main she approved of these exercises, and when Monsieur
Servien scratched his head doubtfully and complained that his
son would not make up his mind to any way of earning a living,
she always took up the cudgels for the "little lad" and silenced
the bookbinder by telling him roundly he knew nothing about it--or
about anything else.

So the worthy man wen