What could I say?  This was the way in which a mere reporter on the Boulevard found himself installed at a five-o’clock tea-table in the salon of a chateau, where surely no newspaper man had ever before set foot and was presented as a young poet and novelist of the future to the old Marquise de Proby, whose guest the master was.  This amiable white-haired dowager questioned me upon my alleged work and I replied equivocally, with blushes, which the good lady must have attributed to bashful timidity.  Then, as though some evil genius had conspired to multiply the witnesses of my bad conduct, the two young women whom I had seen going out, returned in the midst of my unlooked-for visit.  Ah, my interview with this student of femininity upon the Age for Love was about to have a living commentary!  How it would illumine his words to hear him conversing with these new arrivals!  One was a young girl of possibly twenty—­a Russian if I rightly understood the name.  She was rather tall, with a long face lighted up by two very gentle black eyes, singular in their fire and intensity.  She bore a striking resemblance to the portrait attributed to Froncia in the Salon Carre of the Louvre which goes by the name of the “Man in Black,” because the color of his clothes and his mantle.  About her mouth and nostrils was that same subdued nervousness, that same restrained feverishness which gives to the portrait its striking qualities.  I had not been there a quarter of an hour before I had guessed from the way she watched and listened to Fauchery what a passionate interest the old master inspired in her.  When he spoke she paid rapt attention.  When she spoke to him, I felt her voice shiver, if I may use the word, and he, he glorious writer, surfeited with triumphs, exhausted by his labors, seemed, as soon as he felt the radiance of her glance of ingenuous idolatry, to recover that vivacity, that elasticity of impression, which is the sovereign grace of youthful lovers.

“I understand now why he cited Goethe and the young girl of Marienbad,” said I to myself with a laugh, as my hired carriage sped on toward Nemours.  “He was thinking of himself.  He is in love with that child, and she is in love with him.  We shall hear of his marrying her.  There’s a wedding that will call forth copy, and when Pascal hears that I witnessed the courtship—­but just now I must think of my interview.  Won’t Fauchery be surprised to read it day after to-morrow in his paper?  But does he read the papers?  It may not be right but what harm will it do him?  Besides, it’s a part of the struggle for life.”  It was by such reasoning, I remember, the reasoning of a man determined to arrive that I tried to lull to sleep the inward voice that cried, “You have no right to put on paper, to give to the public what this noble writer said to you, supposing that he was receiving a poet, not a reporter.”  But I heard also the voice of my chief saying, “You will never succeed.”  And this second voice,