"But this beautiful, curly, golden hair falling over your shoulders, Belkis? The Crumb Fairy has none of it." "No, for I show it only to my husband." "But the Fairy's two great teeth, Belkis; I do not see them between your fresh, fragrant lips?" "No, they are a superfluity only permissible to old age." "And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this." "No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are grey.'" Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba, until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on the wings of the mandragora's song. This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness--madness instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom? Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought out, or dreamt his story. At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes, philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or, more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In his famous tale, _Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux_, he exhausted the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus: