ved pantiles in common
use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the
heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place
by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more
dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar
kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at either end,
and dark in the middle; 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