A week or two had thus gone by since the dreadful evening at the Opéra Comique, and all this time I had neither seen nor heard more of the fair Josephine. My acquaintance with Franz Müller and the life of the Quartier Latin had, on the contrary, progressed rapidly. Just as the affair of the Opera had dealt a final blow to my romance _à la grisette_ on the one hand, so had the excursion to Courbevoie, the visit to the École de Natation, and the adventure of the Café Procope, fostered my intimacy with the artist on the other. We were both young, somewhat short of money, and brimful of fun. Each, too, had a certain substratum of earnestness underlying the mere surface-gayety of his character. Müller was enthusiastic for art; I for poetry; and both for liberty. I fear, when I look back upon them, that we talked a deal of nonsense about Brutus, and the Rights of Man, and the noble savage, and all that sort of thing, in those hot-headed days of our youth. It was a form of political measles that the young men of that time were quite as liable to as the young men of our own; and, living as we then were in the heart of the most revolutionary city in Europe, I do not well see how we could have escaped the infection. Müller (who took it worse than I did, and was very rabid indeed when I first knew him) belonged just then not only to the honorable brotherhood of Les Chicards, but also to a small debating club that met twice a week in a private room at the back of an obscure Estaminet in the Rue de la Harpe. The members of this club were mostly art-students, and some, like himself, Chicards--generous, turbulent, high-spirited boys, with more enthusiasm than brains, and a flow of words wholly out of proportion to the bulk of their ideas. As I came to know him more intimately, I used sometimes to go there with Müller, after our cheap dinner in the Quartier and our evening stroll along the Boulevards or the Champs Elysées; and I am bound to admit that I never, before or since, heard quite so much nonsense of the declamatory sort as on those memorable occasions. I did not think it nonsense then, however. I admired it with all my heart; applauded the nursery eloquence of these sucking Mirabeaus and Camille Desmoulins as frantically as their own vanity could desire; and was even secretly chagrined that my own French was not yet fluent enough to enable me to take part in their discussions.