How blind they had been not to see it sooner! When Amedee had
read his verses not long since at Sillery's, by what aberration had they
confounded this platitude with simplicity, this whining with sincere
emotion, these stage tricks with art? Ah! you may rest assured, they
never will be caught again!

As the poets' tables at the Cafe de Seville had been for some time
transformed into beds of torture upon which Amedee Violette's poems were
stretched out and racked every day from five to seven, the amiable Paul
Sillery, with a jeering smile upon his lips, tried occasionally to cry
pity for his friend's verses, given up to such ferocious executioners.
But these literary murderers, ready to destroy a comrade's book, are more
pitiless than the Inquisition. There were two inquisitors more relentless
than the others; first, the little scrubby fellow who claimed for his
share all the houris of a Mussulman's palace; another, the great elegist
from the provinces. Truly, his heartaches must have made him gain flesh,
for very soon he was obliged to let out the strap on his waistcoat.

Of course, when Amedee appeared, the conversation was immediately
changed, and they began to talk of insignificant things that they had
read in the journals; for example, the fire-damp, which had killed
twenty-five working-men in a mine, in a department of the north; or of
the shipwreck of a transatlantic steamer in which everything was lost,
with one hundred and fifty passengers and forty sailors--events of no
importance, we must admit, if one compares them to the recent discovery
made by the poet inquisitors of two incorrect phrases and five weak
rhymes in their comrade's work.

Amedee's sensitive nature soon remarked the secret hostility of which he
was the object in this group of poets, and he now came to the Cafe de
Seville only on rare occasions, in order to take Paul Sillery by the
hand, who, in spite of his ironical air, had always shown himself a good
and faithful friend.

It was there that he recognized one evening his classmate of the Lycee,
Arthur Papillon, seated at one of the political tables. The poet wondered
to himself how this fine lawyer, with his temperate opinions, happened to
be among these hot-headed revolutionists, and what interest in common
could unite this correct pair of blond whiskers to the uncultivated,
bushy ones. Papillon, as soon as he saw Amedee, took leave of the group
with whom he was talking and came and offere