, that he was put at once into the correspondence
room. He studied the formulas, and soon became skilful in official
politeness. He now knew the delicate shades which exist between "yours
respectfully" and "most respectfully yours;" and he measured the abyss
which separates an "agreeable" and "homage."

To sum it all up, Amedee was bored, but he was not unhappy; for he had
time to dream.

He went the longest way to the office in the morning, while seeking to
make "amour" rhyme with "jour" without producing an insipid thing; or
else he thought of the third act of his drama after the style of 1830,
and the grand love scene which should take place at the foot of the
Montfaucon gallows. In the evening he went to the Gerards, and they
seated themselves around--the lamp which stood on the dining-room table,
the father reading his journal, the women sewing. He chatted with Maria,
who answered him the greater part of the time without raising her eyes,
because she suspected, the coquette! that he admired her beautiful,
drooping lids.

Amedee composed his first sonnets in her honor, and he adored her, of
course, but he was also in love with the Lantz young ladies, whom he saw
sometimes at Madame Roger's, and who each wore Sunday evenings roses in
her hair, which made them resemble those pantheons in sponge-cake that
pastry-cooks put in their windows on fete days.

If Amedee had been presented to twelve thousand maidens successively,
they would have inspired twelve thousand wishes. There was the servant
of the family on the first floor, whose side-glance troubled him as he
met her on the staircase; and his heart sank every time he turned the
handle of the door of a shop in the Rue Bonaparte, where an insidious
clerk always forced him to choose ox-colored kid gloves, which he
detested. It must not be forgotten that Amedee was very young, and was
in love with love.

He was so extremely timid that he never had had the audacity to tell the
girl at the glove counter that he preferred bronze-green gloves, nor the
boldness to show Maria Gerard his poems composed in her honor, in which
he now always put the plural "amours," so as to make it rhyme with
"toujours," which was an improvement. He never had dared to reply to the
glance of the little maid on the second floor; and he was very wrong to
be embarrassed, for one morning, as he passed the butcher's shop, he saw
the butcher's foreman put his arm about the girl's waist and whisper