All this Gerard remembered, and remembering, hurried down to the old country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful, unspoiled, still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales. They walked together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared dinner for them, and sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to ransack the peasant treasures in the garret. Two portraits were hanging there--one that of a young man of the good old times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an oval frame. Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay, _piquante_, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with a bird perched on her finger. It was the old aunt in her youth, and further search discovered her ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade. Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour; patches were found in a box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber. The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the royal woods, was not far to seek, and Gerard and Sylvie appeared before the aunt, as her old self, and her old lover. "My children!" she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears at the cruel and charming apparition of youth. Presently she dried her tears, and only remembered the pomp and pride of her wedding. "We joined hands, and sang the _naive_ epithalamium of old France, amorous, and full of flowery turns, as the Song of Songs; we were the bride and the bridegroom all one sweet morning of summer." I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things I ever tried to write. The passages are as touching and fresh, the originals I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice of Sylvie singing: "_A Dammartin, l'y a trois belles filles_, _L'y en a z'une plus belle que le jour_!" So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the "Ballad of Forty Years," "Adrienne's dead" in a convent. That is all the story, all the idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the proofs of it (_Le Reve et la Vie_) were in his pocket when they found him dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne. Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace of his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like this: "_Ou sont nos amoureuses_? _Elles sont au tombeau_! _Elles sont plus heureuses_ _Dans un sejour plus beau_." But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air: "_Neither good morn nor good night_." The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone; Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed; But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn, And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!