Lassagne, as I think I have already said, was at that time a man of twenty-eight or thirty, with an attractive face, enshrined in beautiful black hair, animated by black eyes full of intelligence and cleverness, and lighted up (if the phrase may be permitted) by teeth so white and so regular that the vainest of women might have envied them. The only defect in his face was his aquiline nose, which was a little more inclined to one side than the other; but this very irregularity gave an original touch to his face that it would not have had without it. Add to these things a sympathetic voice which seemed gently to vibrate in one's ear, and at the sound of which it was impossible not to turn round and smile. In short, a delightful person whose like I have rarely met; well informed; a brilliant song-writer; the intimate friend of Désaugiers, Théaulon, Armand Gouffé, Brazier, Rougemont and all the opera-writers of the time; so that he refreshed himself after his official work, which he loathed, by entering into the literary world, which he adored, and his daily labour alternated with desultory work, consisting partly of articles for the _Drapeau blanc_ and the _Foudre_ and partly of contributions to some of the most delightful plays of the operatic theatres. It will be admitted that here was the very superior I needed, and I could not have asked Providence for anything that would have seemed to me better for me. Well, during the five years that we spent in the same office there was never a cloud, or a quarrel, or a feeling of cross purposes between Lassagne and me. He made me like the hour at which I began my daily work, because I knew he would come in immediately after me; he made me love the time I spent at my desk, because he was always ready there to help me with an explanation, to teach me something fresh about life, which had as yet, for me, scarcely opened, about the world of which I was totally ignorant, and finally about foreign or national literature, of which in 1823 I knew practically nothing, either of the one or of the other.