‘A woman’, replied the lady with a half smile, ‘has not the right to remember people so easily; that is why I thank you, sir, for being the first to afford me the opportunity of recalling those beautiful and joyous memories. And then—each year of life contains so many events and thoughts—and really it seems to me that it is many years ago?’

‘Years,’ replied Samuel, ‘which for me have been sometimes very slow, sometimes very quick to flee away, but all diversely cruel!’

‘And poetry?’ said the lady with a smile in her eyes.

‘Always, madame!’ replied Samuel laughing. ‘But what is that you are reading?’

‘A novel of Walter Scott’s.’

‘Now I understand your frequent interruptions. Oh, what a tiresome writer! A dusty unearther of chronicles! A wearisome pile of description and bric-à-brac, a heap of all sorts of old things and costumes: armour, crockery, furniture, Gothic inns and melodramatic castles, through which stalk a few puppets on strings, dressed in motley doublet and hose; hackneyed types which no eighteen-year-old plagiarist will look at in ten years; impossible ladies and lovers completely devoid of actuality, no truth of the heart, no philosophy of the sentiments! How different from our good French novelists, where passion and morality are always preferred to the material descriptions of objects! What does it matter whether the lady wears ruff or panniers or an Oudinot underskirt provided she sobs or betrays properly? Does the lover interest you much more because he carries a dagger in his waistcoat instead of a visiting card, and does a despot in a black coat terrify you less poetically than a tyrant encased in leather and mail?’

Samuel, as you see, was drifting into the category of intense people, intolerable and passionate men whose profession ruins their conversation, and for whom every occasion is a good one, even an acquaintanceship struck up under some tree or at some street corner—were it with a rag-picker—obstinately to develop their ideas. The only difference between commercial travellers, roving industrials, hopeful commission agents, and intense poets is the difference between advertising and preaching; the latter vice is quite disinterested.

Now, the lady answered him simply.

‘My dear Monsieur Samuel, I am merely the public, that is sufficient to tell you that I have an innocent soul. Consequently pleasure is for me the easiest thing in the world to find. But let’s talk of yourself: I should esteem myself fortunate were you to judge me worthy of reading some of your productions.’

‘But, madame, how does it happen—?’ exclaimed the swollen vanity of the astonished poet.

‘The proprietor of my circulating library says that he does not know you!’

And she smiled sweetly as if to deaden the effect of this fleeting, teasing thrust.

‘Madame,’ said Samuel sententiously, ‘the true public of the nineteenth century is the women; your support will make me greater than twenty academies.’

‘Well, sir, I count on your promise. Mariette, the parasol and the scarf. Somebody is perhaps getting impatient at home. You know your master is coming back early.’

She made him a graceful, abrupt little bow, which was not in the slightest compromising, and the familiarity of which was not without a certain dignity.

Samuel was in no wise astonished to discover a former youthful love chained by the conjugal tie. In the universal history of sentiment, that is in order. She was called Madame de Cosmelly and lived in one of the most aristocratic streets in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.