says, showing his heart: ‘Take my bear’. This will dispense me from explaining to you how stupid Samuel was. Madame de Cosmelly, that amiable Elmire, who had the clear and prudent vision of virtue, saw promptly what advantage she could gain from this novice of a scoundrel, for her own happiness and for her husband’s honour. She therefore paid him in the same coin; she let him squeeze her hand; she spoke of friendship and Platonic matters. She murmured the word, vengeance; she said that in these painful crises of a woman’s life, one would willingly give to the avenger whatever was left of a heart abandoned by perfidy, and other dramatic sillinesses and marivaudage. In short, she played the coquette for a worthy purpose, and our young roué, who was simpler than a savant, promised to snatch Fanfarlo from M. de Cosmelly and rid him of the courtesan, hoping to find in the arms of the decent woman the reward of this meritorious work. It is only poets who are naïve enough to invent monstrosities of this sort.

A rather comic detail of this story, a sort of intermezzo to the painful drama which was about to be played between these four characters, was the misunderstanding about Samuel’s sonnets; for in the matter of sonnets he was incorrigible; one for Madame de Cosmelly, in which he praised, in mystic style, her Beatrice- like beauty, her voice, the angelic purity of her eyes, the chastity of her gait, etc., the other for Fanfarlo, in which he served her up a ragout of gallantries with enough seasoning to sting the most experienced palate, a type of poetry, by the way, in which he was a past master, and in which he had long ago outstripped the most Andalusian of Andalusians. The first morsel went to the creature, who threw this dish of cucumber into her cigar-box; the second to the poor deserted one, who first stared, then finally understood, and, despite her grief, could not help bursting out laughing as in better days.

Samuel went to the theatre and began to study Fanfarlo on the boards. He found her light, magnificent, vigorous, full of taste in her accoutrements, and considered M. de Cosmelly very lucky to be able to ruin himself for such a piece.

He presented himself twice at her house, a villa with velvety staircase, full of portières and carpets, in a new and leafy district, but under no reasonable pretext could he gain admission. A declaration of love was a profoundly useless and dangerous thing. One rebuff would have prevented him from returning. As for getting himself introduced, he learnt that Fanfarlo never received. A few close friends saw her from time to time. What could he say or do in the house of a dancer magnificently salaried and maintained, and adored by her lover? What could he bring her, he who was neither tailor nor dressmaker, ballet master, or millionaire? He therefore took a brutal and simple decision: Fanfarlo must come to him. At this period, critical and eulogistic articles had more value than now. The facilities of the feuilleton, as a worthy lawyer recently said in a sadly celebrated case, were much greater than to-day; a few talented artists having sometimes capitulated to the journalists, the influence of these adventurous and hair- brained youths no longer knew any bounds. So Samuel undertook—he who did not know a word of music—the special work of criticizing lyrical plays.

Henceforth Fanfarlo was weekly and savagely slated in the bottom columns of an important paper. It was impossible to say, or even hint that her legs, ankles, or knees were badly shaped; the muscles played beneath the stocking, and every opera-glass would have cried blasphemy. She was accused of of being brutal, common, devoid of taste, of wanting to import to our stage habits from beyond the Rhine or the Pyrenees, castanets, spurs, high heels, not to mention the fact that she drank like a trooper, was too fond of little dogs and her caretaker’s daughter, and other dirty linen of private life which is the daily meat and relish of certain little newspapers. With those tactics peculiar to journalists, who insist on comparing dissimilar things, he held up against her an ethereal dancer, always dressed in white, whose chaste movements left every conscience at rest. Sometimes, Fanfarlo shouted and laughed very loudly to the pit when she finished a bound at the footlights; she dared to walk while dancing. Never did she wear those insipid gauzy dresses which show everything and leave nothing to the imagination. She loved stuffs that made a noise, long, crackling, spangled, tinselled dresses, which have to be lifted very high with a vigorous knee, the kind of corsages worn by mountebanks; she danced not with curls, but with ear-rings, I might say candelabras. She would have liked to have tied a crowd of little dolls to the bottom of her skirts, like those old gipsies who tell your fortune with a threatening air, and who are to be met at