showed her
poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these
performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had
just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he
had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de
Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the boudoir
without her mother's knowledge.

Louise drew Lucien to her mattress-cushioned sofa; and with no one to
see or hear, she murmured in his ear, "Dear angel, they did not
understand you; but, 'Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over.'"

And Lucien took comfort from the pretty speech, and forgot his woes
for a little.

"Glory is not to be had cheaply," Mme. de Bargeton continued, taking
his hand and holding it tightly in her own. "Endure your woes, my
friend, you will be great one day; your pain is the price of your
immortality. If only I had a hard struggle before me! God preserve you
from the enervating life without battles, in which the eagle's wings
have no room to spread themselves. I envy you; for if you suffer, at
least you live. You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope
of victory; your strife will be glorious. And when you shall come to
your kingdom, and reach the imperial sphere where great minds are
enthroned, then remember the poor creatures disinherited by fate,
whose intellects pine in an oppressive moral atmosphere, who die and
have never lived, knowing all the while what life might be; think of
the piercing eyes that have seen nothing, the delicate senses that
have only known the scent of poison flowers. Then tell in your song of
plants that wither in the depths of the forest, choked by twining
growths and rank, greedy vegetation, plants that have never been
kissed by the sunlight, and die, never having put forth a blossom. It
would be a terribly gloomy poem, would it not, a fanciful subject?
What a sublime poem might be made of the story of some daughter of the
desert transported to some cold, western clime, calling for her
beloved sun, dying of a grief that none can understand, overcome with
cold and longing. It would be an allegory; many lives are like that."

"You would picture the spirit which remembers Heaven," said the
Bishop; "some one surely must have written such a poem in the days of
old; I like to think that I see a fragment of it in the Song of
Songs."

"Take that as your subject," said Laure de Rastignac, expressing her
artl