Seated at his writing-table that night, and dreaming ecstatically of Rosalie's purity, he had conceived the idea of a poem in which he should draw a contrast between a coquette and a true, tender-hearted girl. Then, being an ardent admirer of Shakespeare and de Musset, his vulgar love affair with Elise underwent a strange metamorphosis and became an Italian romance. There and then he made a rough sketch of the 'Sigisbée,' and composed fifty lines. It was the simple story of a young Venetian noble, named Lorenzo, who had fallen in love with Princess Cœlia, a cold and cruel coquette. The unhappy swain, after wasting much time and many tears in wooing this unrelenting beauty, was advised by a young Marquis de Sénecé, a French _roué_ on a visit to Venice, to affect an interest in the sweet and pretty Countess Beatrice in order to awaken Cœlia's jealousy. He then discovered that the Countess had long loved him, and when Cœlia, caught in the trap, tried to lead him back, Lorenzo, profiting by experience, said the perfidious lady nay, and gave himself up entirely to the charms of her who loved him without guile. Colette, as Cœlia, was speaking while Lorenzo sat lamenting. The _roué_ was cynical and Beatrice lost in dreams. These characters, coming straight from the world of Benedict and Perdican, of Rosalind and Fortunio, strutted on and off, enveloped in a ray of poetry as sweet and light as a moonbeam. As René heard the frequent exclamations of 'Charming!' or 'Exquisite!' that escaped from the crowd of women before him he recalled the nights of wakefulness that this or that passage had cost him. There were these pathetic lines, for instance, written by Lorenzo to Cœlia, and afterwards shown by the latter to Beatrice. How sweet Colette's voice became, in spite of its mocking note, as she read them out. If kisses for kisses the roses could pay When our lips o'er their petals in ecstasy stray; If the lilacs and tall slender lilies could guess How their sweet perfume fills us with sorrowfulness; If the motionless sky and the sea never still Could know how with joy at their beauties we thrill; If all that we love in this strange world below A soul in exchange on our souls could bestow: But the sea set around us, the sky set above, Lilacs, roses, and you, sweet, know nothing of love.