As one enchanted, I returned to the office, accepted my employers’ rebuke as a dismissal, and went home.  I was without a penny, but was immediately visited by a wonderful run of fortune.  Among other strokes of luck, I sold my rascal dog for $25 to an infatuated Englishman, and won six hundred glasses of absinthe at a single game of billiards from the proprietor of the Paris coach, commuting them for a dozen free passages.  I said good-bye to the dear mother and the saintly abbe, and found myself early on a May morning at Adolphe’s door.  I had come to try my fortune with my father’s brothers-at-arms.

Of course, there were bitter disappointments, and when I called on General Foy he was my last hope.  Alas! did I know this subject, or that, or that?  My answer was always “No.”  But the general would at least keep my address; and no sooner had I written it down than he cried aloud that we were saved!  It appeared that I had a good writing, and the Duke of Orleans needed another copyist in his office.  The next morning I was engaged at a salary of twelve hundred francs.  I came home for three days with my mother, and on the advice of the bird-catcher took a ticket at the lottery, which brought me 146 francs.  And so, with a few bits of furniture from home, I took up my lodging in a Parisian garret.

II.—­Launched in Paris

Now began a life of daily work at the office, with agreeable companions, and of evenings spent at the theatre or in study.  On the first night I went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin Theatre, where a melodrama, “The Vampire,” was presented, and fell into conversation with my neighbour, a man of about forty, of fascinating discourse, who was inordinately impatient with the piece, and was at last turned out of the theatre for his expressions of disapproval.  His talk, far more interesting than the play, turned on rare editions of old books, on the sylphs, gnomes, Undines of the invisible world, on microscopic creatures he had himself discovered, and on vampires he had seen in Illyria.  I learned next day that this was the celebrated author and bibliophile, Charles Nodier, himself one of the anonymous authors of the play he so vilified.

Lassagne, a genial colleague in the office, not only put me in the way of doing my work, which I quickly picked up, but was good enough also to guide my reading, for I was deplorably ignorant.  In those days Scribe was the great dramatist, producing innumerable clever plots of intrigue, modelled on no natural society, but on a society all his own, composed almost exclusively of colonels, young widows, old soldiers, and faithful servants.  No one had ever seen such widows and colonels, never soldiers spoke as these did, never were servants so devoted; yet this society of Scribe’s was all the fashion.