I am the Tulip from Batavia’s shore;
  The thrifty Fleming for my beauty rare
  Pays a king’s ransom, when that I am fair,
  And tall, and straight, and pure my petal’s core.

  And, like some Yolande of the days of yore,
  My long and amply folded skirts I wear,
  O’er-painted with the blazon that I bear
  —­Gules, a fess azure; purpure, fretty, or.

  The fingers of the Gardener divine
  Have woven for me my vesture fair and fine,
  Of threads of sunlight and of purple stain;
  No flower so glorious in the garden bed,
  But Nature, woe is me, no fragrance shed
  Within my cup of Orient porcelain.

“Well?” asked Lucien after a pause, immeasurably long, as it seemed to him.

“My dear fellow,” Etienne said, gravely surveying the tips of Lucien’s boots (he had brought the pair from Angouleme, and was wearing them out).  “My dear fellow, I strongly recommend you to put your ink on your boots to save blacking, and to take your pens for toothpicks, so that when you come away from Flicoteaux’s you can swagger along this picturesque alley looking as if you had dined.  Get a situation of any sort or description.  Run errands for a bailiff if you have the heart, be a shopman if your back is strong enough, enlist if you happen to have a taste for military music.  You have the stuff of three poets in you; but before you can reach your public, you will have time to die of starvation six times over, if you intend to live on the proceeds of your poetry, that is.  And from your too unsophisticated discourse, it would seem to be your intention to coin money out of your inkstand.

“I say nothing as to your verses; they are a good deal better than all the poetical wares that are cumbering the ground in booksellers’ backshops just now.  Elegant ‘nightingales’ of that sort cost a little more than the others, because they are printed on hand-made paper, but they nearly all of them come down at last to the banks of the Seine.  You may study their range of notes there any day if you care to make an instructive pilgrimage along the Quais from old Jerome’s stall by the Pont Notre Dame to the Pont Royal.  You will find them all there —­all the Essays in Verse, the Inspirations, the lofty flights, the hymns, and songs, and ballads, and odes; all the nestfuls hatched during the last seven years, in fact.  There lie their muses, thick with dust, bespattered by every passing cab, at the mercy of every profane hand that turns them over to look at the vignette on the title-page.

“You know nobody; you have access to no newspaper, so your Marguerites will remain demurely folded as you hold them now.  They will never open out to the sun of publicity in fair fields with broad margins enameled with the florets which Dauriat the illustrious, the king of the Wooden Galleries, scatters with a lavish hand for poets known to fame.  I came to Paris as you came, poor boy, with a plentiful stock