dancing in the moonlight if he could only have sat up late enough?  The Musset children fell back upon the mysterious machinery of old romance—­trap-doors, secret staircases, etc.—­and began tapping and sounding the walls for private passages and hidden doorways; but in vain.  It was at this stage of the fever that Don Quixote was given to them; and it is a singular illustration both of the genius of the book and the intelligence of the little readers that it put their giants, dwarfs and knights to flight.  During the following summer they passed a few weeks at the manor-house of Cogners with an uncle, the marquis de Musset, the head of the family:  to their great joy, the room assigned them had underneath the great canopied bedstead a trap leading into a small chamber built in the thickness of the floor between the two stories of the old feudal building.  Alfred could not sleep for excitement, and wakened his brother at daybreak to help him explore:  they found the secret chamber full of dust and cobwebs, and returned to their own room with the sense that their dreams had been realized a little too late.  On looking about them they saw that the tapestry on their walls represented scenes from Don Quixote: they burst out laughing, and the days of chivalry were over.

Alfred de Musset was nine years old, as we have said, when he began to attend the College Henri IV. (now Corneille), on entering which he took his place in the sixth form, among boys for the most part of twelve or upward.  He was sent to school on the first day with a deep scalloped collar and his long light curls falling upon his shoulders, and being greeted with jeers and yells by his schoolmates, went home in tears, and the curls were cut off forthwith.  He was an ambitious rather than an assiduous scholar, and kept his place on the bench of honor by his facility in learning more than by his industry; but it was a source of keen mortification to him if he fell behindhand.  His talents soon attracted the attention of the masters and the envy of the pupils, the latter of whom were irritated and humiliated by seeing the little curly-pate, the youngest of them all, always at the head of the class.  The laziest and dullest formed a league against him:  every day, when school broke up, he was assaulted with a brutality equal to that of an English public school, but which certainly would not have been roused against him there by the same cause.  He had to run amuck through the courtyard to the gate, where a servant was waiting for him, often reaching it with torn clothes and a bloody face.  This persecution was stopped by his old playfellow, Orlando Furioso, who was two years his senior:  he threw himself into the crowd one day and dealt his redoubtable blows with so much energy that he scattered the bullies once for all.  Among their schoolmates was the promising duke of Orleans, who was then duc de Chartres, his father, afterward King Louis Philippe, bearing at that time the former title.  He took