a love of the romantic and fantastic, a tendency to look upon life as a novel, an enjoyment of what was unexpected and unlikely, a disposition to trust to chance and the course of events.  The motto of the Mussets was a condensed expression of the gallant love-making, Launcelot side of knightly existence—­Courtoisie, Bonne Aventure aux Preux ("Courtesy, Good Luck to the Paladin;” or, to translate the latter clause more freely, yet more faithfully to the spirit of the original, “None but the Brave Deserve the Fair").  It came from two estates—­Courtoisie, which passed out of the family in the last century, and Bonne Aventure, a property on the Loire, which was not part of Alfred’s patrimony.  The fairies who endowed him at his christening with so many gifts and graces must have meant to complete his outfit when they presented him with such a device, which might have been invented for him at nineteen.  On leaving college he continued his education by studying languages, drawing, and music to please himself, and attempting several professions to satisfy the reasonable expectations of his father.  He found law dry, medicine disgusting, and, discouraged by these failures, he fell into low spirits, to which he was always prone even at the height of his youthful joyousness—­declared to his brother that he was and ever should be good for nothing, that he never should be able to practise a profession, and never could resign himself to being any particular kind of man. His talent for drawing led him to work in a painter’s studio and in the galleries of the Louvre with some success, and for a time he was in high spirits at the idea of having found his calling, and pursued it while attending lectures and classes on other subjects.  This uncertainty lasted a couple of years, during which he began to venture a little into society, of which, like most lively, versatile young people, he was extravagantly fond.  His Muse was still dormant, but his love for poetry was strongly developed; a volume of Andre Chenier was always in his pocket, and he delighted to read it under the trees in the avenues of the Bois on his daily walk out of Paris to the suburb of Auteuil, where his family lived at that time.  Under this influence he wrote a poem, which he afterward destroyed, excepting a few good descriptive lines which he introduced into one of later date.  Meanwhile, he had been presented to the once famous Cenacle, the nucleus of the romantic school, then in the pride and flush of youth and rapidly increasing popularity; its head-quarters were at the house of Victor Hugo facile princeps ordinis even among its chiefs.  There he met Alfred de Vigny, Merimee, Sainte-Beuve and others, whose talents differed essentially in kind and degree, but who were temporarily drawn together by similarity of literary principles and tastes.  Their meetings were entirely taken up with intellectual discussions, or the reading of a new production, or in walks which have been commemorated by Merimee and Sainte-Beuve, when they carried their romanticism to the towers of Notre Dame to see the sun set or the moon rise over Paris.