the boarding-school where she was employed as teacher of music, Madame
Gerard went to live in the Rue St.-Pierre, in Montmartre, where they
found a little cheap, first-floor apartment, with a garden as large as
one's hand.

Now that he was reduced to his one hundred and twenty-five francs, Amedee
was obliged to leave his too expensive apartment in the Rue Notre-Dame-
des-Champs, and to sell the greater part of his family furniture. He
kept only his books and enough to furnish his little room, perched under
the roof of an old house in the Faubourg St.-Jacques.

It was far from Montmartre, so he could not see his friends as often as
he would have liked, those friends whom grief in common had made dearer
than ever to him. One single consolation remained for him--literary
work. He threw himself into it blindly, deadening his sorrow with the
fruitful and wonderful opiate of poetry and dreams. However, he had now
begun to make headway, feeling that he had some thing new to say. He had
long ago thrown into the fire his first poems, awkward imitations of
favorite authors, also his drama after the style of 1830, where the two
lovers sang a duet at the foot of the scaffold. He returned to truth and
simplicity by the longest way, the schoolboy's road. Taste and
inclination both induced him to express simply and honestly what he saw
before him; to express, so far as he could, the humble ideal of the poor
people with whom he had lived in the melancholy Parisian suburbs where
his infancy was passed; in a word, to paint from nature. He tried,
feeling that he could succeed; and in those days lived the most beautiful
and perfect hours of his life--those in which the artist, already master
of his instrument, having still the abundance and vivacity of youthful
sensations, writes the first words that he knows to be good, and writes
them with entire disinterestedness, not even thinking that others will