and he leaned on the marble chimney-piece and wrote a few stanzas,
plaintive and tearful as the funeral strophes of Gilbert. He resembled
Gilbert, and he might have written those lines of his, which will live
as long as the lamentations of Job, in the language of men:

Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J'apparus un jour et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!

Louis's verses had affected me; I took the pencil from him, and,
withdrawing for an instant to the end of the room, I wrote in my turn
the following verses, which will die with me unknown to all; they were
the first verses that sprung from my heart, and not from my
imagination. I read them out without daring to raise my eyes to her, to
whom they were addressed. They ran thus--

* * * * *

but, no! I efface them! My love was all my genius, and they have
departed together.

As I finished reading the verses, I saw on Julie's face, on which the
light of the lamp fell, such a tender expression of surprise and such
superhuman beauty, that I stood uncertain, as my verses had expressed
it, between the woman and the angel,--between love and adoration. This
latter feeling predominated at last in my heart, and in that of my
friend. We fell on our knees before the sofa, and kissed the end of the
black shawl which enveloped her feet. The verses seemed to her merely
an instantaneous and solitary expression of my feelings towards her;