THE CHATEAU DE SAINTE AULAIRE.

     “Mark yon old mansion frowning through the trees,
     Whose hollow turret wooes the whistling breeze.”

My acquaintance with Mademoiselle Josephine progressed rapidly; although, to confess the truth, I soon found myself much less deeply in love than I had at first supposed.  For this disenchantment, fate and myself were alone to blame.  It was not her fault if I had invested her with a thousand imaginary perfections; nor mine if the spell was broken as soon as I discovered my mistake.

Too impatient to wait till Sunday, I made my way on Saturday afternoon to Rue Aubry-le-Boucher.  I persuaded myself that I was bound to call on her, in order to conclude our arrangements for the following day.  At all events, I argued, she might forget the engagement, or believe that I had forgotten it.  So I went, taking with me a magnificent bouquet, and an embroidered satin bag full of marrons glaces.

My divinity lived, as she had told me, sous les toits—­and sous les toits, up seven flights of very steep and dirty stairs, I found her.  It was a large attic with a sloping roof, overlooking a bristling expanse of chimney-pots, and commanding the twin towers of Notre Dame.  There were some colored prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed prie-dieu chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few articles of household furniture of the humblest description.  In all this there was nothing vulgar.  Under other circumstances I might, perhaps, have even elicited somewhat of grace and poetry from these simple materials.  But conceive what it was to see them through an atmosphere of warm white steam that left an objectionable clamminess on the backs of the chairs and caused even the door-handle to burst into a tepid perspiration.  Conceive what it was to behold my adored one standing in the middle of the room, up to her elbows in soap-suds, washing out the very dress in which she was to appear on the morrow....  Good taste defend us!  Could anything be more cruelly calculated to disturb the tender tenor of a lover’s dreams?  Fancy what Leander would have felt, if, after swimming across the Hellespont, he had surprised Hero at the washing-tub!  Imagine Romeo’s feelings, if he had scaled the orchard-walls only to find Juliet helping to hang out the family linen!

The worst of it was that my lovely Josephine was not in the least embarrassed.  She evidently regarded the washing-tub as a desirable piece of furniture, and was not even conscious that the act of “soaping in,” was an unromantic occupation!

Such was the severity of this first blow that I pleaded an engagement, presented my offerings (how dreadfully inappropriate they seemed!), and hurried away to a lecture on materia medica at the Ecole Pratique; that being a good, congenial, dismal entertainment for the evening!