dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five.  He approaches the portrait abstractedly.  There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat.  He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

“What then?” I asked, as he paused.

“My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses.  A mirror hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the man he was with the man he had been.  He never told me and I never asked what his feelings were at that moment.  Did he feel that he was too culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry?  Did he comprehend that through his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved?  Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it?  I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the purity, the soul of a man of twenty.”

A few hours after this conversation, I found myself once more in the office of the Boulevard, seated in Pascal’s den, and he was saying, “Already?  Have you accomplished your interview with Pierre Fauchery?”

“He would not even receive me,” I replied, boldly.

“What did I tell you?” he sneered, shrugging his big shoulders.  “We’ll get even with him on his next volume.  But you know, Labarthe, as long as you continue to have that innocent look about you, you can’t expect to succeed in newspaper work.”

I bore with the ill-humor of my chief.  What would he have said if he had known that I had in my pocket an interview and in my head an anecdote which were material for a most successful story?  And he has never had either the interview or the story.  Since then I have made my way in the line where he said I should fail.  I have lost my innocent look and I earn my thirty thousand francs a year, and more.  I have never had the same pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit to Nemours.  I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I wanted to, since, with all my laborious work I have never written a book.  And yet when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented me from committing toward a dearly loved master a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, “If you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it.”  And this is the reason, now that Fauchery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has come for me to relate my first interview.  There is none of which I am more proud.