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CHAPTER I

THE POET SEEKS HIS OWN

It is said that, when a man is on his way from one friend to another, the intervening period of the journey is spent in thought, half at the house which he has left, half at the house to which he is going. So it was with Lucien Sylvestre.

As he rattled along in the hot, crowded diligence— as yet the iron horses were not-he seemed to himself to be sitting on a yet harder seat than that beneath him, in a wretched attic, and he heard, not the creaking of the wheels and the snores of the passengers, but the gruff, abrupt voice of a young fellow about his own age, who said the same thing over and over again. Wonderful is the power of anyone possessed of fortitude and patience enough to do this!

Socrates, according to later philosophers, owed much of his authority to the use of the method. Women, however, as a general rule, understand it better than men; they are keener to discount the value of appearances. It was most probably a woman who first found out that a drop of water wears away stone. A man may seem to be impervious as the rock to a certain idea, but let him only become addicted to the society of someone who will reiterate it day after day, night after night, and ten to one it will work its way into him at last, more especially if, like Lucien, he

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never can succeed in saying the same thing twice himself.

At first, when his friend the journalist ventured to suggest to him that his friend the marquis was playing him false, he became indignant, furious—it was 'impossible.' On the next occasion, when Blum threw out a hint to the same effect, he could not adopt the same line of defence-it was highly improbable.' The next time he asserted that he could see no motive. The fourth time he declared that, even if it were so, he should be the last man in the world to take any steps; the fifth time, that the evidence of his own senses would not convince him that it was true. And, having said this, he started off the day following, to give his senses a chance.

Now, the result of this action was startling, and it provoked discussion afterwards among Lucien's acquaintance. Gentlemen considered that he had done wisely, if not well. Ladies, on the other hand—young ladies even more vehemently than other ladies-protested that he ought never to have behaved as he did. Perhaps the initial mistake lay in the fact of his having two intimate friends. If he had had one, or three, he would not have been pulled opposite ways. Emotion, like everything else, is very much a matter of arithmetic.

For hours he kept up an imaginary conversation with Blum in such a brilliant style of monologue à deux, that even Walter Savage Landor, who was writing about that time, could not have improved upon it. He said all the things that Blum never said. He gave himself-always under the guise of Blumso many excellent reasons why de Civrac must with

out doubt be playing him false, that in the end he was quite convinced. Probabilities? Why, they were all in Blum's favour. Motives? Why, there was any number of them, once Blum had begun; the only difficulty was to stop him.

When Lyons was left further and further behind, however, when the suburbs yielded to villages, the villages to hamlets, the hamlets to fields, the fields to woods, the scene within the man within the diligence changed. As one dissolving view fades and melts into another, so did the attic fade and melt into a room. which was, of all rooms he had ever seen, the most exquisite. The naked walls covered themselves with prints from Dürer, the boarded floor (the chinks between filled up with dust) changed to a Persian carpet, the grate was wreathed about with chiselled fruits of pomegranate and roses, the dingy windows cleared into purest crystal, until there was apparently no medium at all between the eyes of those within and the sunshine. There were books about, but not too many books. The room did not belong to them, they did not fill it from floor to ceiling and spread their own peculiar smell of fragrant silence round. The marquis was a connoisseur, and no enthusiast. His dainty first editions lurked under silken, embroidered curtains, on little shelves carved with appropriate devices. People did more than read and think-they talked among them; and this cannot be done with any enjoyment in your true library. Yet at the present moment the imaginary conversation there was far less easy to carry on than that in the attic. Lucien himself talked very well, but the marquis was unaccountably stupid. He seemed to have no answers whatever. Once, even,

he was on the brink of an apology, but, of course, Lucien would not permit that. He forgave him at once, and from the heart, in the most magnanimous manner; and therewith the diligence stopped, and he was compelled to get out. He had never been sorry

to reach the end of that journey before.

It was a fine moonlight evening in April. The marquis was eccentric, and dined at eight instead of five; he reckoned that he should be in good time.

Yet, now that he was actually on the point of arriving, he shrank from it. There were two ways by which he could strike across into the long, thin poplar avenue that led to the château; he might go by the road, and this was the shorter; or he might take to the woods. He had never done that on former occasions-never, indeed, thought twice about it. But tonight he was possessed with a desire to walk in the woods. The more practical part of him suggested that he had found them very dark, even at sunset, when the marquis insisted on returning home by the longer round. But it was surely the most practical part which responded with the information that this was natural, because the path lay along the eastern boundary, and no light could penetrate till the moon was up. The moon was up now. So he went by the woods, and beautiful enough they were, but he did not enjoy their beauty.

As he drew near the house, it annoyed him to feel none of the eager delight in the reappearance of its familiar roof, curled outwards at both ends, which he had always experienced of old. What absurd sensitiveness was this! Why should he be forced to go through the emotions of a despicable spy, coming in

on false pretences to discover the nakedness of the land, when his sentiments towards the marquis were, as he assured himself over and over again, completely unchanged. For all that, he rang the bell as if he were ashamed.

'Why, Monsieur Lucien!' the old butler said, 'who would have thought it was you?'

He had not gone near the place for a long time, but he felt sure of his welcome there; for all his doubts, it had never occurred to him to doubt concerning that.

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The marquis showed more pleasure than surprise at the sight of his younger friend, who was wont to come whenever he liked-sometimes very often, sometimes after a more or less prolonged period of absence. is true that, since the beginning of their acquaintance, he had never kept away for so many months together. Lucien thought that the marquis ought to have been astonished. To a man of warm feeling the occasion called for some display of more than ordinary gratification. They should not have sat down to dinner almost at once.

The marquis could not endure the unadorned prose of simple roast and boiled: he held that a good cook is only another kind of poet, and he had secured the services of a cordon bleu who was the wonder of all his guests. The salary of this cook was discussed far and wide throughout the Department, but the marquis himself asserted that wages had nothing to do with it. He cherished a favourite theory that people are what you make them. He believed that his cook was the best in the country, and his cook responded to that belief.

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