nose should tumble into her
mouth.]

[Footnote 49: Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes.
Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.]

[Footnote 50: Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]

[Footnote 51: Bipede sans plume: biped without feathers--pen.]

[Footnote 52: Municipal officer of Toulouse.]

[Footnote 53: Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so
young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could
not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny
household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!
Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched
thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.
Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the
Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn
round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells!
What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming
bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple
arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy
couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived
concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet
forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had
already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee
from eve till morn. 'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of
the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place Dauphine!
When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy
delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret. I have read
a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than
Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial
goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou
didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going
and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine
ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of
aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love
stammers a charming slang? Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;
thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware
bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup. And those great misfortunes whic