barn for a week? I shall
have time to write to my people, and they will either come to fetch me
or send me money."

"I am quite willing, always supposing that my husband has no
objection.--Hey! little man!"

The miller came up, gave Lucien a look over, and took his pipe out of
his mouth to remark, "Three francs for a weeks board? You might as well
pay nothing at all."

"Perhaps I shall end as a miller's man," thought the poet, as his eyes
wandered over the lovely country. Then the miller's wife made a bed
ready for him, and Lucien lay down and slept so long that his hostess
was frightened.

"Courtois," she said, next day at noon, "just go in and see whether
that young man is dead or alive; he has been lying there these fourteen
hours."

The miller was busy spreading out his fishing-nets and lines. "It is
my belief," he said, "that the pretty fellow yonder is some starveling
play-actor without a brass farthing to bless himself with."

"What makes you think that, little man?" asked the mistress of the mill.

"Lord, he is not a prince, nor a lord, nor a member of parliament, nor a
bishop; why are his hands as white as if he did nothing?"

"Then it is very strange that he does not feel hungry and wake up,"
retorted the miller's wife; she had just prepared breakfast for
yesterday's chance guest. "A play-actor, is he?" she continued. "Where
will he be going? It is too early yet for the fair at Angouleme."

But neither the miller nor his wife suspected that (actors, princes, and
bishops apart) there is a kind of being who is both prince and actor,
and invested besides with a magnificent order of priesthood--that the
Poet seems to do nothing, yet reigns over all humanity when he can paint
humanity.

"What can he be?" Courtois asked of his wife.

"Suppose it should be dangerous to take him in?" queried she.

"Pooh! thieves look more alive than that; we should have been robbed by
this time," returned her spouse.

"I am neither a prince nor a thief, nor a bishop nor an actor," Lucien
said wearily; he must have overheard the colloquy through the window,
and now he suddenly appeared. "I am poor, I am tired out, I have come
on foot from Paris. My name is Lucien de Rubempre, and my father was
M. Chardon, who used to have Postel's business in L'Houmeau. My sister
married David Sechard, the printer in the Place du Murier at Angouleme."

"Stop a bit," said the miller, "that printer is the son of the old
skinflint who fa