all at once on the page of your history or grammar, and strange to say,
pursues you at your games; when the noisy games of your companions weary
you, and you betake yourself to solitude in order to screen your thoughts.

And solitude, a bad adviser, takes possession of your thoughts, isolates
them from the rest of the real world, in order to immerse them in imaginary
worlds, and then agitates, reflects, whirls, polishes all that marvellous
enchanted universe in which the daughters of Eve wander with each wild
license, whom the base-born sons of Adam approach only a single step.

But when that step is taken, the enchanted world vanishes. The scaffolding
cracks and falls down. Palaces, geail, heroes and bounteous fairies
disappear pell-mell into the lowest depth. The old farce of humanity, the
comedy of love is played out.

Ah! how ugly it all is then! Under the smoky lamp of reality you vaguely
distinguish the battered grotesque shapes, rising in the ruins.

Suzanne therefore, like all her young friends, like you, Mademoiselle, and
also like you formerly, Madame, had commenced her little romance, had
sketched her little plot. She had loved, oh truly loved, with a love
necessarily confined to the platonic state, the handsome young men with
tasty cravats, whom she had seen on days when she walked out. What
delightful chapters were sketched upon their brown or fair heads! Oh! when
would she be free? When would she cease to have the ever-open eye of an
inquisitive under-mistress upon her slightest gesture?

And then the day of liberty had come, and under the breath of that liberty,
so eagerly and impatiently expected, the chapters she had begun were
blotted out, and so was the handsome head of a cherub or an Amadis in a