firmly
believed he might have seen them dancing in the moonlight if he could only
have sat up late enough? The Musset children fell back upon the mysterious
machinery of old romance--trap-doors, secret staircases, etc.--and began
tapping and sounding the walls for private passages and hidden doorways;
but in vain. It was at this stage of the fever that _Don Quixote_ was given
to them; and it is a singular illustration both of the genius of the book
and the intelligence of the little readers that it put their giants, dwarfs
and knights to flight. During the following summer they passed a few weeks
at the manor-house of Cogners with an uncle, the marquis de Musset, the
head of the family: to their great joy, the room assigned them had
underneath the great canopied bedstead a trap leading into a small chamber
built in the thickness of the floor between the two stories of the old
feudal building. Alfred could not sleep for excitement, and wakened his
brother at daybreak to help him explore: they found the secret chamber full
of dust and cobwebs, and returned to their own room with the sense that
their dreams had been realized a little too late. On looking about them
they saw that the tapestry on their walls represented scenes from _Don
Quixote:_ they burst out laughing, and the days of chivalry were over.

Alfred de Musset was nine years old, as we have said, when he began to
attend the College Henri IV. (now Corneille), on entering which he took his
place in the sixth form, among boys for the most part of twelve or upward.
He was sent to school on the first day with a deep scalloped collar and his
long light curls falling upon his shoulders, and being greeted with jeers
and yells by his schoolmates, went home in tears, and the curls were cut
off forthwith. He was an ambitious rather than an assiduous scholar, and
kept his place on the bench of honor by his facility in learning more than
by his industry; but it was a source of keen mortification to him if he
fell behindhand. His talents soon attracted the attention of the masters
and the envy of the pupils, the latter of whom were irritated and
humiliated by seeing the little curly-pate, the youngest of them all,
always at the head of the class. The laziest and dullest formed a league
against him: every day, when school broke up, he was assaulted with a
brutality equal to that of an English public school, but which certainly
would not have been roused against him there by th