‘I thought as much,’ replied Fanfarlo. ‘But you are a monster. These are abominable tactics. Poor girls that we are!’ she added laughing. ‘Flore, my bracelet. Give me your arm to my carriage, and tell me whether you liked me this evening.’

They went off thus, arm in arm, like two old friends. Samuel was in love, or at least felt his heart beating hard. He was perhaps odd, but certainly, this time he was not ridiculous.

In his joy, he had almost forgotten to warn Madame de Cosmelly of his success, and to bring hope to her deserted home.

A few days afterwards, Fanfarlo was playing the part of Columbine in a huge pantomime created for her by some men of genius. Here, by an agreeable succession of transformations, she appeared in the characters of Columbine, Marguerite, Elvire and Zépherine, and, in the gayest possible way, received the kisses of several generations of personages borrowed from various countries and various literatures. A great musician had not disdained to write a fantastic score appropriate to the queerness of the subject. Fanfarlo was, in turn, respectable, fairy-like, mad, mirthful; she was sublime in her art, as much an actress with her legs as a dancer with her eyes.

In our country the art of dancing is too much despised, let me say in passing. All great nations, first of all those of the ancient world, those of India and Arabia have cultivated it to the same extent as poetry. Dancing is as much above music, for certain pagan temperaments at least, as the visible and created are above the invisible and uncreated: only those can understand me to whom music gives pictorial ideas. Dancing can reveal all the mystery hidden in music, and it has, moreover, the merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs: it is matter, graceful and terrible, beautified by movement. Terpischore is a southern muse; I presume she was very dark, and often shook her feet in the golden wheat; her movements, full of precise cadence, are so many divine motifs for the sculptor. But Fanfarlo, the Catholic, not content with rivalling Terpischore, called to her aid all the art of more modern divinities. Commingled in the mists are forms of fairies and water-sprites less diaphanous and less nonchalant. She was at once a Shakespearean caprice and an Italian drollery.

The poet was delighted; he thought he saw before his eyes the dream of his earliest days. He would willingly have cut ridiculous capers in his box and bumped his head against something in the mad intoxication that possessed him.

A low, close-curtained carriage rapidly carried the poet and the dancer towards the villa of which I have spoken.

Our man expressed his admiration by silent kisses which he fervently showered on her hands and feet. She too admired him very much, not that she was ignorant of the power of her charms, but she had not met a man so odd or a passion so electric.

The weather was black as the grave, and the wind, rocking together masses of clouds, from their joltings drew down a shower of rain and hail. A great tempest shook the attics, and made the steeples moan; the gutter, that funereal bed which swallows up the love letters and orgies of last night, foamingly swept along its thousand secrets to the sewers: mortality swooped joyously down on the hospitals, and the Chattertons and Savages of the Rue Saint-Jacques clenched their frozen fingers over their writing decks, when the most false, the most greedy, the most sensual, the most witty of our friends sat down before a fine supper and a good table in the company of one of the most beautiful women ever fashioned by nature for the pleasure of the eyes. Samuel wanted to open the window to cast a conqueror’s glance over the accursed town; then lowering his gaze to the various felicities which he had beside him, he hastened to enjoy them.

In the company of such things he had to be eloquent; so despite his too high brow, his hair like a virgin forest and his snuff-taker’s nose, Fanfarlo found that he was almost right.