David, with his well-balanced mind and timid nature at variance with a strong constitution, was by no means wanting in the persistence of the Northern temper; and if he saw all the difficulties before him, none the less he vowed to himself to conquer, never to give way. In him the unswerving virtue of an apostle was softened by pity that sprang from inexhaustible indulgence. In the friendship grown old already, one was the worshiper, and that one was David; Lucien ruled him like a woman sure of love, and David loved to give way. He felt that his friend’s physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.
“The ox for patient labor in the fields, the free life for the bird,” he thought to himself. “I will be the ox, and Lucien shall be the eagle.”
So for three years these friends had mingled the destinies bright with such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that appeared above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace—the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of art and science, till they forgot the hard life of the present, for their minds were wholly bent on laying the foundations of future fame.
“Lucien,” said David, “do you know what I have just received from Paris?” He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. “Listen!”
And David read, as a poet can read, first André de Chénier’s Idyll “Néere,” then “Le Malade,” following on with the “Elegy on a Suicide,” another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two “Iambes.”
“So that is André de Chénier!” Lucien exclaimed again and again. “It fills one with despair!” he cried for the third time, when David surrendered the book to him, unable to read further for emotion.—“A poet rediscovered by a poet!” said Lucien, reading the signature of the preface.
“After Chénier had written those poems, he thought that he had written nothing worth publishing,” added David.
Then Lucien in his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called “L’Aveugle” and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came upon the line—
If they know not bliss, is there happiness on earth?
He pressed the book to his lips, and tears came to the eyes of either, for the two friends were lovers and fellow-worshipers.
The vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the rifted, battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were spreading in every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-reliefs and uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of architecture, erected by fairy hands. Fancy had scattered flowers and crimson gems over the gloomy little yard, and Chénier’s Camille became for David the Eve whom he worshiped, for Lucien a great lady to whom he paid his homage. Poetry had shaken out her starry robe above the workshop where the “monkeys” and “bears” were grotesquely busy among types and presses. Five o’clock struck, but the friends felt neither hunger nor thirst; life had turned to a golden dream, and all the treasures of the world lay at their feet. Far away on the horizon lay the blue streak to which Hope points a finger in storm and stress; and a siren voice sounded in their ears, calling, “Come, spread your wings; through that streak of gold or silver or azure lies the sure way of escape from evil fortune!”
Just at that moment the low glass door of the workshop was opened, and out came Cérizet, an apprentice (David had brought the urchin from Paris). This youth introduced a stranger, who saluted the friends politely, and spoke to David.
“This, sir, is a monograph which I am desirous of printing,” said he, drawing a huge package of manuscript from his pocket. “Will you oblige me with an estimate?”
“We do not undertake work on such a scale, sir,” David answered, without looking at the manuscript. “You had better see the Messieurs Cointet about it.”
“Still we have a very pretty type which might suit it,” put in Lucien, taking up the roll. “We must ask you to be kind enough, sir, to leave your commission with us and call again tomorrow, and we will give you an estimate.”
“Have I the pleasure of addressing M. Lucien Chardon?”
“Yes, sir,” said the foreman.
“I am fortunate in this opportunity of meeting with a young poet destined to such greatness,” returned the author. “Mme. de Bargeton sent me here.”
Lucien flushed red at the name, and stammered out something about gratitude for the interest which Mme. de Bargeton took in him. David noticed his friend’s embarrassed flush, and left him in conversation with the country gentleman, the author of a monograph on silkwork cultivation, prompted by vanity to print the effort for
