Every year, at Saint Michel, in the month when the clear heaven is spotted with kites, in one square of the old city, by the side of the paved road by which the Paris coaches formerly passed with sonorous smacking of the whip, a palace of new planks would rise in a few days as light as a house of cards. Enormous placards on every wall announced the arrival of a grand circus consisting of fifty horses and one hundred and fifty artists. For some weeks beforehand our boyish hearts were seriously disturbed. Every day, after school-hours, with [p160] books under our arms, walking like truant schoolboys, we went to enjoy, through the half-open doors of the stables, the intoxicating smell of horses, blended with the scent of fresh sawdust and that perfume of musk which turns the brains of men. And then, peeping through the chinks between the badly fitting planks, we could watch, in the half light of the circus, the rehearsals of the beautiful equestrians for whom our youthful hearts were beating, as naïve and courageous as those of their own horses. At last some fine morning the passers by would see on the placards the announcement of a gala performance. “The professors of the college and MM. the pupils of the Lycée will honour this entertainment by their presence.” It was on one of these evenings, now almost twenty years ago, that I first saw and loved poor Émilie Loisset, before her success in Paris and Vienna, when she made her _début_ in the _haute école_, and played in a pantomime disguised as Prince Charming, with her sister Clotilde, now an Hungarian princess. Her touching story has been related by Philippe Daryl in his charming novel _La Petite Lambton_. At that time Émilie was not more than eighteen years old, and she was the most charming creature in the world. Still her eyes and her face wore a curiously melancholy expression. I learnt afterwards that the most flattering success could never dispel the instinctive distrust of life, the romantic fancy for gloomy subjects which afterwards led her to take a house exactly opposite the little cemetery of Maisons-Laffitte. She was buried in it two days after she had been carried from the circus mutilated and crushed by the fall of her horse, which, in refusing a jump, had fallen upon her. [p161] Forgive me for opening this chapter by evoking the melancholy smile of one who is no more. But I owe this tribute to Émilie Loisset; for it is through her, that, as a child, I received the first revelation of the beauty of a woman on horseback, of the artistic union of the two most perfect curvilineal forms in creation—the horse adding height to the woman by the majesty of its stature, the woman daringly poised on the animal like a wing. [Illustration]