He gazed at his canvas through his tears; suddenly he rose with a gesture of pride and cast a flashing glance at the two painters. "By the blood, by the body, by the head of the Christ! you are jealous hounds who wish to make me believe that it is spoiled, in order to steal it from me! But I can see her!" he cried, "and she is wonderfully lovely!" At that moment, Poussin heard Gillette crying in a corner where she was cowering, entirely forgotten. "What is the matter, my angel?" asked the painter, suddenly become the lover once more. "Kill me!" she said. "I should be a shameless creature to love you still, for I despise you. I admire you and I have a horror of you! I love you, and I believe that I hate you already." While Poussin listened to Gillette. Frenhofer covered his _Catherine_ with a green curtain, with the calm gravity of a jeweller closing his drawers when he thinks that he is in the company of clever thieves. He bestowed upon the two painters a profoundly cunning glance, full of contempt and suspicion, and silently ushered them out of his studio, with convulsive haste; then standing in his doorway, he said to them: "Adieu, my little friends." That "adieu" horrified the two painters. The next day Porbus, in his anxiety, went again to see Frenhofer, and learned that he had died in the night, after burning all his pictures. 1831. A Seashore Drama To MADAME LA PRINCESSE CAROLINE GALITZIN DE GENTHOD, NÉE COMTESSE WALEWSKA: _The author's homage and remembrances._ Young men almost always have a pair of compasses with which they delight to measure the future; when their will is in accord with the size of the angle which they make, the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of moral life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which in the case of all men comes between the years of twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the age of noble thoughts, the age of first conceptions, because it is the age of unbounded desires, the age at which one doubts nothing; he who talks of doubt speaks of impotence. After that age, which passes as quickly as the season for sowing, comes the age of execution. There are in a certain sense two youths: one during which one thinks, the other during which one acts; often they are blended, in men whom nature has favoured, and who, like Caesar, Newton, and Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men.