Lamartine now enjoys a period of triumph, the period of budding fame. Fame did not come to him early, for he was thirty years old; but it penetrated like the first rays of the rising sun into his ambitious soul. Let us picture to ourselves a salon in the days of Louis XVIII, as described by writers of the day. About a hundred persons are assembled in a suite of drawing-rooms in the house of some important personage, say General Foy. Lamartine, then an attaché of the embassy in Florence, but for the moment in Paris on one of his short visits, is among the invited guests.[1] A movement of admiration passes through the assembly as he enters--young, erect, handsome, aristocratic in mien and bearing. A crowd, chiefly of ladies, gathers round him; he is conscious of charming faces, splendid toilettes, smiles and flattery on every side. People forget for a moment to offer their congratulations to the deputies present on their last speeches. Even those who have not seen Lamartine before know him at once, for he outshines all. General Foy goes up to him, enthusiastically presses his hand, and assures him that it is in his power, whenever he chooses, to become an ornament of the Chamber, which has long stood in need of just such a talented champion of the sacred principles of royalty. Then Lamartine, in the melodious voice which as yet has never uttered a political catchword, repeats one or two of his first poems--_L'Enthousiasme, Souvenir, Le Désespoir, La Prière, La Foi_, or some such reflective pieces--thereby producing boundless ecstasy, and calling forth outbursts of every shade of enthusiasm and gratitude. Benjamin Constant comes up with his impenetrable, solemnly ironic mien, congratulates him on having discovered this new fountain of poetical inspiration, and assures him that he knows of no such loftiness and purity of thought and expression except in Schiller's reflective poems. The ladies are of opinion that this comparison is very flattering indeed to Schiller, an unknown German bourgeois poet, whose name they just remember having heard. What is he compared with Lamartine! Various circumstances contributed to heighten the effect produced by the poems themselves--in the first place, the uncommon and almost feminine personal beauty of their author; in the second, the rumours in circulation regarding the lady whose praises were sung with such seraphic enthusiasm, such supernatural purity. It was reported that the poet had loved, and that death had deprived him of the object of his affections. Much trouble was taken to discover the actual circumstances of the case. Who was this Elvire? What was her real name? We of to-day have been sufficiently enlightened by Lamartine's own later prose works, but with the satisfaction of curiosity on this subject interest in Lamartine's lyric poetry is not extinguished.