To wind up with, just now as I was coming home after dinner, I passed a workman and his family in the Rue Bonaparte, and the man pointed after me, saying: 

“Look! there goes a poet.”

He was right.  In me the lawyer’s clerk is in abeyance, the lawyer of to-morrow has disappeared, only the poet is left—­that is to say, the essence of youth freed from the parasitic growths of everyday life.  I feel it roused and stirring.  How sweet life is, and what wonderful instruments we are, that Hope can make us thus vibrate by a touch of her little finger!

     ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

     Happy men don’t need company
     Lends—­I should say gives
     Natural only when alone, and talk well only to themselves
     One doesn’t offer apologies to a man in his wrath
     Silence, alas! is not the reproof of kings alone
     The looks of the young are always full of the future
     You a law student, while our farmers are in want of hands

THE INK STAIN BY RENE BAZIN

(Tache d’Encre)

By Rene Bazin

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER VIII

JOY AND MADNESS

May 1st.

These four days have seemed as if they never would end—­especially the last.  But now it wants only two minutes of noon.  In two minutes, if Lampron is not late—­

Rat-a-tat-tat!

“Come in.”

“It is twelve o’clock, my friend; are you coming?”

It was Lampron.

For the last hour I had had my hat on my head, my stick between my legs, and had been turning over my essay with gloved hands.  He laughed at me.  I don’t care.  We walked, for the day was clear and warm.  All the world was out and about.  Who can stay indoors on May Day?  As we neared the Chamber of Deputies, perambulators full of babies in white capes came pouring from all the neighboring streets, and made their resplendent way toward the Tuileries.  Lampron was in a talkative mood.  He was pleased with the hanging of his pictures, and his plan of compaign against Mademoiselle Jeanne.

“She is sure to have heard of it, Fabien, and perhaps is there already.  Who can tell?”

“Oh, cease your humbug!  Yes, very possibly she is there before us.  I have had a feeling that she would be for these last four days.”

“You don’t say so!”

“I have pictured her a score of times ascending the staircase on her father’s arm.  We are at the foot, lost in the crowd.  Her noble, clear-cut profile stands out against the Gobelin tapestries which frame it with their embroidered flowers; one would say some maiden of bygone days had come to life, and stepped down from her tapestried panel.”

“Gentlemen!” said Lampron, with a sweep of his arm which took in the whole of the Place de la Concorde, “allow me to present to you the intending successor of Counsellor Mouillard, lawyer, of Bourges.  Every inch of him a man of business!”