Thus their young natures awoke to love. Cézanne and Baille were then about eighteen years of age, Zola was seventeen. But their aspirations remained full of ideality. There were a few brief, uncertain attempts at love-making, nipped in the bud by circumstances. Already, before the time we have now reached, Zola, or his musically minded friend Marguery, or perhaps both, had nursed a boyish flame for the fair-haired daughter of a local haberdasher, and had serenaded her in company, the former with his clarionet, the latter with a _cornet-à-piston_, until one evening the indignant parents emptied their water-jugs over them. Later Zola dreamt of encountering "fair beings in his rambles, beautiful maidens, who would suddenly spring up in some strange wood, charm him for a whole day, and melt into air at dusk."[21] And at last a young girl, Gratienne, flits by in the moonlight near the Clos des Chartreux, with her heavy tresses of raven hair resting on her young white neck;[22] but even she remains little more than a vision, and as yet, neither into Zola's life nor his friends' does woman, the real creature of flesh and blood, really enter, to achieve that work of disillusion by which she almost invariably destroys the youthful ecstacy which she, or her semblance, has inspired. Ninon, the Ninon of the "Contes"[23], comes later. As yet she is only dreamt of, though the name by which she is to be known to the world is already suggested by an old gravestone in the cemetery, with only the word "Nina" remaining of its time-worn inscription:** "Ami, te souviens-tu de la tombe noircie, Tout au bord d'une allée, à demi sous les fleurs, Qui nous retint longtemps, et nous laissa rêveurs? Le marbre en est rongé par les vents et la pluie. Elle songe dans l'herbe et, discrête, se tait, Souriante et sereine au blond soleil de mai. "Elle songe dans l'herbe, et, de sa rêverie, La tombe, chastement, à ceux qui passent là, Ne livre que le nom effacé de NINA. . . . . . Ami, te souviens-tu, nous la rêvâmes belle, Et depuis, bien souvent, sans jamais parler d'elle, Nos regards se sont dit, dans un dernier regret: 'Si je l'avais connue, oh! Ninette vivrait!'"[24]