, he knocked over something, or moved the table.

"Hush, dear," exclaimed Charlotte, in distress, while Mother
Archambauld, laying the table, moved on the points of her big
feet--moved as lightly as possible, so as not to disturb "her master who
was at work."

He was heard up-stairs--pushing back his chair, or moving his table.
He had laid a sheet of paper before him; on this paper was written the
title of his book, but not another word. And yet he now had all that
formerly he had said would enable him to make a reputation,--leisure,
sufficient means, freedom from interruption, a pleasant study, and
country air. When he had had enough of the forest, he had but to turn
his chair, and from another window he obtained an admirable view of sky
and water. All the aroma of the woods, all the freshness of the river,
came directly to him. Nothing could disturb him, unless it might be the
cooing and fluttering of the pigeons on the roof above.

"Now to work!" cried the poet. He opened his portfolio, and seized his
pen, but not one line could he write. Think of it! To live in a pavilion
of the time of Louis XV., on the edge of a forest in that beautiful
country about Etiolles, to which the memory of the Pompadour is attached
by knots of rose-colored ribbons and diamond buckles. To have around
him every essential for poetry,--a charming woman named in memory of
Goethe's heroine, a Henri II. chair in which to write, a small white
goat to follow him from place to place, and an antique clock to mark the
hours and to connect the prosaic Present with the romance of the Past!
All these were very imposing, but the brain was as sterile as when
D'Argenton had given lessons all day and retired to his garret at night,
worn out in body and mind.

When Charlotte's step was heard on the stairs, he assumed an expression
of profound absorption. "Come in," he said, in reply to her knock,
timidly repeated. She entered fresh and gay, her beautiful arms bared to
the elbows, and with so rustic an air that the rice-powder on her face
seemed to be the flour from some theatrical mill in an opera bouffe.

"I have come to see my poet," she said, as she came in. She had a way
of drawling out the word poet that exasperated him. "How are you getting
on?" she continued. "Are you pleased?"

"Pleased? Can one ever be pleased or satisfied in this terrible
profession, which is a perpetual strain on every nerve!"

"That is true enough, my friend; and yet I wo