“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 Andre de Chenier’s Idyll Neere, 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 Andre de Chenier!” 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 Chenier 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 Chenier’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 Cerizet, 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 to-morrow, and we will give you an estimate.”