age, like all the other energies of man. Example proves it; and
it is this which terrifies me. Am I sure that I have not myself
already suffered this great loss? I should surely have felt it,
but for the happy meeting which has rejuvenated me. Poets speak of
the Fountain of Youth; it does exist; it gushes up from the earth
at every step we take. And one passes by without drinking of it!

The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed,
all grey-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter--
so that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now
once more finds a purpose and a reason for being.

To-day I "take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the
terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite
de Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. I sit
and dream. My thoughts escape from my head like the foam from a
bottle of beer. They are light, and their fizzing amuses me. I
dream; such a pastime is certainly permissible to an old fellow who
has published thirty volumes of texts, and contributed to the 'Journal
des Savants' for twenty-six years. I have the satisfaction of
feeling that I performed my task as well as it was possible for me
to do, and that I utilised to their fullest extent those mediocre
faculties with which Nature endowed me. My efforts were not all in
vain, and I have contributed, in my own modest way, to that
renaissance of historical labours which will remain the honour of
this restless century. I shall certainly be counted among those ten
or twelve who revealed to France her own literary antiquities. My
publication of the poetical works of Gautier de Coincy inaugurated
a judicious system and fixed a date. It is in the austere calm of
old age that I decree to myself this deserved credit, and God, who