the house. Then, in order that her eldest daughter might not
be so far from the boarding-school where she was employed as teacher of
music, Madame Gerard went to live in the Rue St.-Pierre, in Montmartre,
where they found a little cheap, first-floor apartment, with a garden as
large as one's hand.

Now that he was reduced to his one hundred and twenty-five francs,
Amedee was obliged to leave his too expensive apartment in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and to sell the greater part of his family
furniture. He kept only his books and enough to furnish his little room,
perched under the roof of an old house in the Faubourg St.-Jacques.

It was far from Montmartre, so he could not see his friends as often as
he would have liked, those friends whom grief in common had made dearer
than ever to him. One single consolation remained for him--literary
work. He threw himself into it blindly, deadening his sorrow with the
fruitful and wonderful opiate of poetry and dreams. However, he had now
begun to make headway, feeling that he had some thing new to say. He
had long ago thrown into the fire his first poems, awkward imitations of
favorite authors, also his drama after the style of 1830, where the two
lovers sang a duet at the foot of the scaffold. He returned to truth
and simplicity by the longest way, the schoolboy's road. Taste and
inclination both induced him to express simply and honestly what he saw
before him; to express, so far as he could, the humble ideal of the poor
people with whom he had lived in the melancholy Parisian suburbs where
his infancy was passed; in a word, to paint from nature. He tried,
feeling that he could succeed; and in those days lived the most
beautiful and perfect hours of his life--those in which the artist,
already master of his instrument, having still the abundance and
vivacity of youthful sensations, writes the first words that he knows
to be good, and writes them with entire disinterestedness, not even
thinking that others will see them; working for himself alone and for
the sole joy of putting in visible form and spreading abroad his ideas,
his thoughts-all his heart. Those moments of pure enthusiasm and perfect
happiness he never could know again, even after he had nibbled at the
savory food of success and had experienced the feverish desire for
glory. Delicious hours they were, and sacred, too, such as can only be
compared to the divine intoxication of first love.

Amedee worked courage