He had never been seen in the company of a petticoat, in the evenings on the ramparts. The working girls of P...., sharp-tongued wantons, had ended by leaving him alone, after seeing him, on several occasions, stand before them almost suffocated from embarrassment, and taking their laughs of encouragement for mockery. Julien's paradise, the one place where he breathed freely, was his room. There only, he felt sheltered from the world. There, he straightened up; he laughed to himself; and, when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he was surprised to find himself so young. His room was vast. He had furnished it with a large canopy bed, a round table, two chairs and an armchair. But there still remained plenty of room for walking about. The bed was lost in the depths of an immense alcove; a small chest of drawers, between the two windows, looked like a child's plaything. He walked about, stretched himself, and never seemed bored. He never wrote away from the bureau, and reading tired him. His only passion was music. He would spend entire evenings playing the flute. That was, above everything, his greatest recreation. Julien had learned by himself to play the flute. For a long time, an old yellow flute at a bric-à-brac merchant's on the market square had aroused his covetousness. He had the money, but he did not dare enter and buy it, for fear of exciting ridicule. At last, one evening, he grew bold enough to get the flute and carry it away on the run, hidden under his coat. Then, doors and windows closed, he had studied for two years out of an old method that he had picked up at a bookseller's. During the last six months only, he risked playing with the windows open. He knew nothing but ancient airs, slow and simple, romances of the last century, which acquired an infinite tenderness as he stumbled over them with the awkwardness of a pupil filled with emotion. In the warm evenings, when the quarter was asleep, and this light song floated from the large room lighted by a single candle it seemed like a voice of love confiding to the solitude of the night what it never would have uttered in broad daylight.