smile showed teeth made to devour patrimonies.  Unfortunately, Mademoiselle Rose de Juin’s—­that was the young lady’s theatrical name—­charming head was full of the foolishness and vanity of a poor actress.  Her attacks of rage when she read an article in the journals which cut her up, her nervous attacks and torrents of tears when they gave her parts with only fifteen lines in a new piece, had begun to annoy Amedee, when chance gave him a new rival in the person of Gradoux, an actor in the Varietes, the ugly clown whose chronic cold in the head and ugly face seemed for twenty years so delicious to the most refined public in the world.  Relieved of a large number of bank-notes, Violette discreetly retired.

He next carried on a commonplace romance with a pretty little girl whose acquaintance he made one evening at a public fete.  Louison was twenty years old, and earned her living at a famous florist’s, and was as pink and fresh as an almond-bush in April.  She had had only two lovers, gay fellows—­an art student first—­then a clerk in a novelty store, who had given her the not very aristocratic taste for boating.  It was on the Marne, seated near Louison in a boat moored to the willows on the Ile d’Amour, that Amedee obtained his first kiss between two stanzas of a boating song, and this pretty creature, who never came to see him without bringing him a bouquet, charmed the poet.  He remembered Beranger’s charming verses, “I am of the people as well, my love!” felt that he loved, and was softened.  In reality, he had turned this naive head.  Louison became dreamy, asked for a lock of his hair, which she always carried with her in her ‘porte-monnaie’, went to get her fortune told to know whether the dark-complexioned young man, the knave of clubs, would be faithful to her for a long time.  Amedee trusted this simple heart for some time, but at length he became tired of her vulgarities.  She was really too talkative, not minding her h’s and punctuating her discourse with “for certain” and “listen to me, then,” calling Amedee “my little man,” and eating vulgar dishes.  One day she offered to kiss him, with a breath that smelled of garlic.  She was the one who left him, from feminine pride, feeling that he no longer loved her, and he almost regretted her.

Thus his life passed; he worked a little and dreamed much.  He went as rarely as possible to Maurice Roger’s house.  Maurice had decidedly turned out to be a good husband, and was fond of his home and playing with his little boy.  Every time that Amedee saw Maria it meant several days of discouragement, sorrow, and impossibility of work.

“Well! well!” he would murmur, throwing down his pen, when the young woman’s face would rise between his thoughts and his page; “I am incurable; I shall always love her.”