money was allowed to me, and what can you do in Paris without money?  Moreover, my freedom was carefully chained up.  Monsieur Lepitre sent me to the law school accompanied by a man-of-all-work who handed me over to the professor and fetched me home again.  A young girl would have been treated with less precaution than my mother’s fears insisted on for me.  Paris alarmed my parents, and justly.  Students are secretly engaged in the same occupation which fills the minds of young ladies in their boarding-schools.  Do what you will, nothing can prevent the latter from talking of lovers, or the former of women.  But in Paris, and especially at this particular time, such talk among young lads was influenced by the oriental and sultanic atmosphere and customs of the Palais-Royal.

The Palais-Royal was an Eldorado of love where the ingots melted away in coin; there virgin doubts were over; there curiosity was appeased.  The Palais-Royal and I were two asymptotes bearing one towards the other, yet unable to meet.  Fate miscarried all my attempts.  My father had presented me to one of my aunts who lived in the Ile St. Louis.  With her I was to dine on Sundays and Thursdays, escorted to the house by either Monsieur or Madame Lepitre, who went out themselves on those days and were to call for me on their way home.  Singular amusement for a young lad!  My aunt, the Marquise de Listomere, was a great lady, of ceremonious habits, who would never have dreamed of offering me money.  Old as a cathedral, painted like a miniature, sumptuous in dress, she lived in her great house as though Louis XV. were not dead, and saw none but old women and men of a past day,—­a fossil society which made me think I was in a graveyard.  No one spoke to me and I had not the courage to speak first.  Cold and alien looks made me ashamed of my youth, which seemed to annoy them.  I counted on this indifference to aid me in certain plans; I was resolved to escape some day directly after dinner and rush to the Palais-Royal.  Once seated at whist my aunt would pay no attention to me.  Jean, the footman, cared little for Monsieur Lepitre and would have aided me; but on the day I chose for my adventure that luckless dinner was longer than usual,—­either because the jaws employed were worn out or the false teeth more imperfect.  At last, between eight and nine o’clock, I reached the staircase, my heart beating like that of Bianca Capello on the day of her flight; but when the porter pulled the cord I beheld in the street before me Monsieur Lepitre’s hackney-coach, and I heard his pursy voice demanding me!

Three times did fate interpose between the hell of the Palais-Royal and the heaven of my youth.  On the day when I, ashamed at twenty years of age of my own ignorance, determined to risk all dangers to put an end to it, at the very moment when I was about to run away from Monsieur Lepitre as he got into the coach,—­a difficult process, for he was as fat as Louis XVIII. and club-footed,—­well,