reat souls, was the rule of their daily life. It may be imagined,
therefore, that their standard of requirements was not an easy one; they
were too conscious of their worth, too well aware of their happiness,
to care to trouble their life with the admixture of a new and unknown
element.

This federation of interests and affection lasted for twenty years
without a collision or disappointment. Death alone could thin the
numbers of the noble Pleiades, taking first Louis Lambert, later Meyraux
and Michel Chrestien.

When Michel Chrestien fell in 1832 his friends went, in spite of
the perils of the step, to find his body at Saint-Merri; and Horace
Bianchon, Daniel d'Arthez, Leon Giraud, Joseph Bridau, and Fulgence
Ridal performed the last duties to the dead, between two political
fires. By night they buried their beloved in the cemetery of
Pere-Lachaise; Horace Bianchon, undaunted by the difficulties,
cleared them away one after another--it was he indeed who besought the
authorities for permission to bury the fallen insurgent and confessed to
his old friendship with the dead Federalist. The little group of friends
present at the funeral with those five great men will never forget that
touching scene.

As you walk in the trim cemetery you will see a grave purchased in
perpetuity, a grass-covered mound with a dark wooden cross above it,
and the name in large red letters--MICHEL CHRESTIEN. There is no other
monument like it. The friends thought to pay a tribute to the sternly
simple nature of the man by the simplicity of the record of his death.

So, in that chilly garret, the fairest dreams of friendship were
realized. These men were brothers leading lives of intellectual effort,
loyally helping each other, making no reservations, not even of their
worst thoughts; men of vast acquirements, natures tried in the crucible
of poverty. Once admitted as an equal among such elect souls, Lucien
represented beauty and poetry. They admired the sonnets which he read to
them; they would ask him for a sonnet as he would ask Michel Chrestien
for a song. And, in the desert of Paris, Lucien found an oasis in the
Rue des Quatre-Vents.

At the beginning of October, Lucien had spent the last of his money on a
little firewood; he was half-way through the task of recasting his work,
the most strenuous of all toil, and he was penniless. As for Daniel
d'Arthez, burning blocks of spent tan, and facing poverty like a hero,
not a word of complain