e seen to
please! But immediately, with a blush of shame, the generous poet chased
away this jealous fancy. But every Sunday, when Maria, lowering her
eyes, and with a slightly embarrassed voice, repeated her question,
"Have you received any news from Monsieur Maurice?" Amedee felt a
cruelly discouraged feeling, and thought, with deep sadness:

"She never will love me!"

To conquer this new grief, he plunged still more deeply into work; but
he did not find his former animation and energy. After the drizzling
rain of the last days of March, the spring arrived. Now, when Amedee
awoke, it was broad daylight at six o'clock in the morning. Opening
his mansard window, he admired, above the tops of the roofs, the large,
ruddy sun rising in the soft gray sky, and from the convent gardens
beneath came a fresh odor of grass and damp earth. Under the shade of
the arched lindens which led to the shrine of a plaster Virgin, a first
and almost imperceptible rustle, a presentiment of verdure, so to
speak, ran through the branches, and the three almond trees in the
kitchen-garden put forth their delicate flowers. The young poet was
invaded by a sweet and overwhelming languor, and Maria's face, which
was commonly before his inner vision upon awakening, became confused and
passed from his mind. He seated himself for a moment before a table
and reread the last lines of a page that he had begun; but he was
immediately overcome by physical lassitude, and abandoned himself to
thought, saying to himself that he was twenty years old, and that it
would be very good, after all, to enjoy life.

CHAPTER X. A BUDDING POET

It is the first of May, and the lilacs in the Luxembourg Gardens are in
blossom. It has just struck four o'clock. The bright sun and the pure
sky have rendered more odious than ever the captivity of the office to
Amedee, and he departs before the end of the sitting for a stroll in the
Medicis garden around the pond, where, for the amusement of the children
in that quarter, a little breeze from the northeast is pushing on a
miniature flotilla. Suddenly he hears himself called by a voice which
bursts out like a brass band at a country fair.

"Good-day, Violette."

It is Jocquelet, the future comedian, with his turned-up nose,
which cuts the air like the prow of a first-class ironclad, superb,
triumphant, dressed like a Brazilian, shaved to the quick, the dearest
hope of Regnier's class at the Conservatoire-Jocquelet, w