Nevertheless, at the first going off, I thoroughly felt the intoxication of being once more in my native land. I had saluted Paris with the enthusiasm that causes the sailor to shout ‘Land, land!’ after a long absence. I was very young, but I had lived a good deal in a few years. Storms and hurricanes, privation and struggle, even hair-breadth escapes from death--I had known them all. And yet it seemed to me that as recently as the night before I had wandered under the chestnut-trees of the Tuileries, and in the galleries of the Palais-Royal, where I now found myself after a three years’ exile. I was very excited while traversing the Passages, the Places, the bridges, and I ran along them quickly as if in deadly fear of their escaping me once more. I looked at the Seine as if she were an old friend, and still everything was new to me, everything touched a chord of tenderness--even the discordant cries of the itinerant vendors with whom the streets of Paris swarmed. I felt as if I were taking possession of it once more. At sixteen there seems to be such a very long future before one. All that is probable seems possible. One feels unconsciously that by the right of one’s youth the command of the world must devolve upon one. The awakening from this dream was indeed very sombre. I began by calling upon the business people whose addresses my ‘father’ had given me. Some were absent, others pretended to have lost all recollection of us. I took care not to call upon my school-fellows in order to arouse their pity, for I remembered the words Colville had constantly repeated to me at Hamburg: ‘Try to dispense with everything rather than ask a service of the man whom you consider your best friend.’ Consequently, as a rule, I ascended to my perch dead with fatigue, and not at all disposed to say with Pope ‘Whatever is, is right.’ It is true that I got some sympathy from our poor servant, Marie, to dispel the dejection plainly visible on my face. The excellent creature always chose stories calculated to make my blood curdle. ‘A few months ago,’ she said to me, ‘a young and handsome boy, named Denville, lived in this very room. From morn to night he wrote--he was a savant--and then, in order to get a little recreation, he sang, accompanying himself on the guitar. Besides being a savant he was an artist. All this was very well, but though he spent very little, the poor boy never settled his bill, and during the seven months he lodged at the hotel no one had ever seen the colour of his money. He promised well enough, but he wrote in vain to his family, who lived in Rheims. There is none so deaf as those who won’t hear, and not a cent came from Champagne. There are some very hard-hearted parents--very hard-hearted indeed. And that’s why the young fellow so often repeated that no parent comes up to a louis d’or, and that the staunchest friend is the pawnshop.