ing
down a dark road on which the moonlight produced alternations of light
and shadow, and Blanche suddenly became rooted to the spot as though a
spectre had sprung at her head, and refused to move,--she who was
usually so docile that Queen Mab's whip, made of a cricket's bone with a
spider's thread for a thong, was enough to start her into a gallop,--I
could not repress a slight shudder or refrain from peering into the
darkness rather anxiously, while at times the harmless trunks of ash or
birch trees would appear to me as spectral-looking as one of Goya's
"Caprices."

I took great delight in driving these dear animals myself, and we soon
became very intimate. It was merely as a matter of form that I held the
reins, for the least click of the tongue was enough to direct them, to
turn them to the right or the left, to make them go faster, or to stop
them. They quickly learned all my habits and started of themselves for
the office, the printer's, the publishers', the Bois de Boulogne, and
the houses where I went to dinner on certain days of the week, and this
so accurately that they would have ended by compromising me, for they
would have revealed the places to which I paid the most mysterious
visits. If I happened to forget the time in the course of an interesting
or tender conversation they would remind me it was getting late by
neighing or pawing in front of the balcony.

Although I greatly enjoyed traversing the city in the phaeton drawn by
my two friends, I could not help at times thinking the north wind sharp
and the rain cold when the months came along which the Republican
calendar named so appropriately the months of mist, of frost, of rain,
of wind, of snow (brumaire, frimaire, pluviose, ventose, nivose), so I
purchased a small blue coupe, lined with white reps, which was likened
to the equipage of the famous dwarf of the day, a piece of impertinence
I did not mind. A brown coupe, lined with garnet, followed the blue one,
and was itself replaced by a dark-green coupe lined with dark blue, for
I actually did sport a coach--I, poor newspaper writer holding no
Government stock--for five or six years. And my ponies were none the
less fat and in good condition though they were fed on literature, had
substantives for oats, adjectives for hay, and adverbs for straw. But
alas! there came, no one knows very well why, the Revolution in
February; a great many paving-stones were picked up for patriotic
purposes, and Paris