locality.  If, after a long day at Dr. Cheron’s, or the Hotel Dieu, or the Ecole de Medecine, I did waste a few hours now and then, I, at least, wasted them cheaply.  Cheaply, but oh, so pleasantly!  Ah me! those nights at the debating club, those evenings at the Chicards, those student’s balls at the Chaumiere, those third-class trips to Versailles and Fontainebleau, those one-franc pit seats at the Gaiete and the Palais Royal, those little suppers at Pompon’s and Flicoteau’s—­how delightful they were!  How joyous!  How free from care!  And even when we made up a party and treated the ladies (for to treat the ladies is de rigueur in the code of Quartier Latin etiquette), how little it still cost, and what a world of merriment we had for the money!

It was well for me, too, and a source of much inward satisfaction, that my love-affair with Mademoiselle Josephine had faded and died a natural death.  We never made up that quarrel of the Opera Comique, and I had not desired that we should make it up.  On the contrary, I was exceedingly glad of the opportunity of withdrawing my attentions; so I wrote her a polite little note, in which I expressed my regret that our tastes were so dissimilar and our paths in life so far apart; wished her every happiness; assured her that I should ever remember her with friendly regard; and signed my name with a tremendous flourish at the bottom of the second page.  With the note, however, I sent her a raised pie and a red and green shawl, of which I begged her acceptance in token of amity; and as neither of those gifts was returned, I concluded that she ate the one and wore the other, and that there was peace between us.

But the scales of fortune as they go up for one, go down for another.  This man’s luck is balanced by that man’s ruin—­Orestes falls sick, and Pylades returns from Kissingen cured of his lumbago—­old Croesus dies, and little Miss Kilmansegg comes into the world with a golden spoon in her mouth, So it fell out with Franz Mueller and myself.  As I happily steered clear of Charybdis, he drifted into Scylla—­in other words, just as I recovered from my second attack of the tender passion, he caught the epidemic and fancied himself in love with the fair Marie.

I say “fancied,” because his way of falling in love was so unlike my way, that I could scarcely believe it to be the same complaint.  It affected neither his appetite, nor his spirits, nor his wardrobe.  He made as many puns and smoked as many pipes as usual.  He did not even buy a new hat.  If, in fact, he had not told me himself, I should never have guessed that anything whatever was the matter with him.

It came out one day when he was pressing me to go with him to a certain tea-party at Madame Marotte’s, in the Rue St. Denis.

“You see,” said he, “it is la petite Marie’s fete; and the party’s in her honor; and they’d be so proud if we both went to it; and—­and, upon my soul, I’m awfully fond of that little girl"....