in silence.

This was the state of the affairs in the tiny republic which, in the
heart of the Rue Saint-Denis, was not unlike a dependency of La
Trappe. But to give a full account of events as well as of feelings,
it is needful to go back to some months before the scene with which
this story opens. At dusk one evening, a young man passing the
darkened shop of the Cat and Racket, had paused for a moment to gaze
at a picture which might have arrested every painter in the world. The
shop was not yet lighted, and was as a dark cave beyond which the
dining-room was visible. A hanging lamp shed the yellow light which
lends such charm to pictures of the Dutch school. The white linen, the
silver, the cut glass, were brilliant accessories, and made more
picturesque by strong contrasts of light and shade. The figures of the
head of the family and his wife, the faces of the apprentices, and the
pure form of Augustine, near whom a fat chubby-cheeked maid was
standing, composed so strange a group; the heads were so singular, and
every face had so candid an expression; it was so easy to read the
peace, the silence, the modest way of life in this family, that to an
artist accustomed to render nature, there was something hopeless in
any attempt to depict this scene, come upon by chance. The stranger
was a young painter, who, seven years before, had gained the first
prize for painting. He had now just come back from Rome. His soul,
full-fed with poetry; his eyes, satiated with Raphael and Michael
Angelo, thirsted for real nature after long dwelling in the pompous
land where art has everywhere left something grandiose. Right or
wrong, this was his personal feeling. His heart, which had long been a
prey to the fire of Italian passion, craved one of those modest and
meditative maidens whom in Rome he had unfortunately seen only in
painting. From the enthusiasm produced in his excited fancy by the