dle; the walls
covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who
had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across
the ceiling, the stacks of paper, the old-fashioned presses, the pile
of slabs for weighting the damp sheets, the rows of cases, and the two
dens in the far corners where the master printer and foreman sat--and
you will have some idea of the life led by the two friends.

One day early in May, 1821, David and Lucien were standing together by
the window that looked into the yard. It was nearly two o'clock, and
the four or five men were going out to dinner. David waited until the
apprentice had shut the street door with the bell fastened to it; then
he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the smell of paper, ink, and
presses and old woodwork had grown intolerable to him, and together
they sat down under the vines, keeping the office and the door in
view. The sunbeams, playing among the trellised vine-shoots, hovered
over the two poets, making, as it were, an aureole about their heads,
bringing the contrast between their faces and their characters into a
vigorous relief that would have tempted the brush of some great
painter.

David's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the
man born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned
upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in
keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick
crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported
by a thick neck, he looked at first sight like one of Boileau's
canons: but on a second glance there was that in the lines about the
thick lips, in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of the square
nostrils, with the broad irregular line of central cleavage, and,
above all, in the eyes, with the steady light of an all-absorbing love
that burned in them, which revealed the real character of the man--the
wisdom of the thinker, the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that
discerns the horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end of
winding ways, turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of
fruition, known as yet in idea alone, and quick to turn from them in
disgust. You might look for the flash of genius from such a face; you
could not miss the ashes of the volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a
profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and
lack of fortune condemns so many a lo