rampart of their lives
and fortunes between her and sorrow. Monsieur," Dumay remarked after a
pause, "you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier. For fifteen
years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of many a
bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner there; the
Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I suffered. I have
seen thousands of my comrades die,--but you, you have given me a chill
to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt before."

Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only
flattered him,--a thing which at this period of his life had become
almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the
first perfumed phial that praise had broken over his head.

"Ah, my soldier!" he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay's shoulder,
and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier of the empire
tremble, "this young girl may be all in all to you, but to society at
large what is she? nothing. At this moment the greatest mandarin in
China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the universe in
mourning, and what is that to you? The English are killing thousands of
people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this very moment while
I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being burned alive,--did
that make you care less for your cup of coffee this morning at
breakfast? Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in rags does not
cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever finds it; and
yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost five louis, and
I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy, exclaiming, 'Divine!
delicious! charming! food for the soul!' Social nature, like Nature
herself, is a great forgetter. You will be quite surprised ten years
hence at what you have done to-day. You are here in a city where people
die, where they marry, where they adore each other at an assignation,
where young girls suffocate themselves, where the man of genius with
his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane beneficence goes to the
bottom,--all side by side, sometimes under the same roof, and yet
ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent. And here you come
among us and ask us to expire with grief at this commonplace affair."

"You call yourself a poet!" cried Dumay, "but don't you feel what you
write?"

"Good heavens! if we endured the joys or the woes we sing we should
be as w