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pieces, in covering Mimi’s hands with kisses like a glove; but the daily bread was the feuilleton of the Corsaire, and as Rodolphe had neither money nor books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a feuilleton for the Corsaire the life of that day, each day he lived the feuiilleton of the next. It was thus that the morrow of I know not what quarrel, after the style of the lovers of Horace, Mimi leaning on her lover’s arm was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet of the Feuilles d’automne, she returned home quite proud to the Rue des Canettes, and that very evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of the most pleasing chapters.”

Rodolph himself surely speaks in the following letter written to Léon Noël after he had received three hundred and fifty francs on account of an epithalamium on the marriage of a Russian princess in 1841. . . “If I do not send you this message by a courier in my own livery it is solely because you live a little too near. Thirty leagues—it is not worth the trouble, otherwise my means would permit it, for at the present moment I swim in a river of gold, an ocean of fifty centime pieces. It is a regular rain of monarchs and monarchesses of all nations and all kinds of profiles, I wash my hands in Pactolus and in almond paste. I have multicolored gloves, ditto coats, ditto trousers. You see poets are humbugs when they assert that life is evil and gloomy. They do not know life, these howlers of maiserere nobis, they do not dream of the existence of a crowd of pleasures which I now enjoy, they have never understood all the enjoyment one feels to hear a cabman ask you for an extra tip, they ignore the amount of perfume there is in a Havana cigar, of lustre in the best composites, and of harmony in the creak of a tight-fiitting patent leather boot. Well, all this I feel, I see, I hear. You would no longer recognize your stout Fleming. He has