This bit of poetry, declaimed with all the talent of a great actor, petrified the lieutenant, whose eyes opened to their utmost extent, and whose astonishment delighted the poet.

“I will permit you,” continued the peacock, spreading his tail, “out of respect for your position, which I fully appreciate, to open that coffer and look for the letter of your young lady.  Though I know I am right, I remember names, and I assure you you are mistaken in thinking—­”

“And this is what a poor child comes to in this gulf of Paris!” cried Dumay,—­“the darling of her parents, the joy of her friends, the hope of all, petted by all, the pride of a family, who has six persons so devoted to her that they would willingly make a rampart of their lives and fortunes between her and sorrow.  Monsieur,” Dumay remarked after a pause, “you are a great poet, and I am only a poor soldier.  For fifteen years I served my country in the ranks; I have had the wind of many a bullet in my face; I have crossed Siberia and been a prisoner there; the Russians flung me on a kibitka, and God knows what I suffered.  I have seen thousands of my comrades die,—­but you, you have given me a chill to the marrow of my bones, such as I never felt before.”

Dumay fancied that his words moved the poet, but in fact they only flattered him,—­a thing which at this period of his life had become almost an impossibility; for his ambitious mind had long forgotten the first perfumed phial that praise had broken over his head.

“Ah, my soldier!” he said solemnly, laying his hand on Dumay’s shoulder, and thinking to himself how droll it was to make a soldier of the empire tremble, “this young girl may be all in all to you, but to society at large what is she? nothing.  At this moment the greatest mandarin in China may be yielding up the ghost and putting half the universe in mourning, and what is that to you?  The English are killing thousands of people in India more worthy than we are; why, at this very moment while I am speaking to you some ravishing woman is being burned alive,—­did that make you care less for your cup of coffee this morning at breakfast?  Not a day passes in Paris that some mother in rags does not cast her infant on the world to be picked up by whoever finds it; and yet see! here is this delicious tea in a cup that cost five louis, and I write verses which Parisian women rush to buy, exclaiming, ‘Divine! delicious! charming! food for the soul!’ Social nature, like Nature herself, is a great forgetter.  You will be quite surprised ten years hence at what you have done to-day.  You are here in a city where people die, where they marry, where they adore each other at an assignation, where young girls suffocate themselves, where the man of genius with his cargo of thoughts teeming with humane beneficence goes to the bottom,—­all side by side, sometimes under the same roof, and yet ignorant of each other, ignorant and indifferent.  And here you come among us and ask us to expire with grief at this commonplace affair.”