ark the track of their flight,
A luminous pathway in Heaven and a beacon for evermore.

"Do you read the riddle?" said Amelie, giving M. du Chatelet a
coquettish glance.

"It is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we
left school," said the Baron with a bored expression--he was acting
his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal
in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and
warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads.
Nowadays this poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels,
seistrons, the plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of
paradise freshened up with a few new words such as 'immense, infinite,
solitude, intelligence'; you have lakes, and the words of the
Almighty, a kind of Christianized Pantheism, enriched with the most
extraordinary and unheard-of rhymes. We are in quite another latitude,
in fact; we have left the North for the East, but the darkness is just
as thick as before."

"If the ode is obscure, the declaration is very clear, it seems to
me," said Zephirine.

"And the archangel's armor is a tolerably thin gauze robe," said
Francis.

Politeness demanded that the audience should profess to be enchanted
with the poem; and the women, furious because they had no poets in
their train to extol them as angels, rose, looked bored by the
reading, murmuring, "Very nice!" "Charming!" "Perfect!" with frigid
coldness.

"If you love me, do not congratulate the poet or his angel," Lolotte
laid her commands on her dear Adrien in imperious tones, and Adrien
was fain to obey.

"Empty words, after all," Zephirine remarked to Francis, "and love is
a poem that we live."

"You have just expressed the very thing that I was thinking, Zizine,
but I should not have put it so neatly," said Stanislas, scanning
himself from top to toe with loving attention.

"I would give, I don't know how much, to see Nais' pride brought down
a bit," said Amelie, addressing Chatelet. "Nais sets up to be an
archangel, as if she were better than the rest of us, and mixes us up
with low people; his father was an apothecary, and his mother is a
nurse; his sister works in a laundry, and he himself is a printer's
foreman."

"If his father sold biscuits for worms" (_vers_), said Jacques, "he
ought to have made his son take them."

"He is continuing in his father's line of business, for the stuff that
he has just been readin