It was in the Luxembourg Gardens that I first made the acquaintance of Méry. I was introduced to him there. We drew together like iron and magnet; and, although I really could not say which of us was iron and which magnet, we became inseparable. I was already well forward with my drama _Christine._ I repeated about two or three hundred lines to him, and he encouraged me greatly. I stood in much need of this encouragement. I had just undergone a change of position. When Oudard saw that I was incorrigible, and found out that I was working at a drama, he moved me from the Secretarial Department to the Record Offices. And this was equivalent to disgracing me. I was put there with a tiny old man of eighty years, called M. Bichet, who since 1788 had always dressed in a pair of satin breeches, variegated stockings, a black cloth coat and a waistcoat of flowered silk. This costume was finished off with ruffles and frills. His face, which was surrounded by a halo of snow-white hair ending in a little queue, was ruddy and honest and kindly in expression. He tried to receive me rudely, but did not manage to succeed. My extreme politeness to him disarmed him. He showed me my place, and loaded my table with all the accumulated arrears of work that lack of a clerk for a month had brought about. I finished the work by the end of three days. I carried it to him in his office, and asked him for something else. "What! something else already?" he exclaimed. "Certainly." "Why?" "Because I have done what you gave me." "Completely finished it?" "Completely." "Oh! oh! oh!" gasped M. Bichet. And he picked up my work with the air of a man who says to himself, "It must have been pretty badly scamped!" M. Bichet was mistaken: my mettle had been roused. Each report, each despatch, each copy drew from him an exclamation of delight. "Really," he said, "really this is very good! Excellent, monsieur, excellent!... Your writing is the same style as Piron's, monsieur." "The deuce! That is a fine compliment for me." "You know Piron's handwriting? He was a copying clerk for five years in this Record Office, monsieur." "Oh, indeed!... So my handwriting is like his?" "You have another point in common with him, I hear." "What is that, monsieur?" "You write poetry." "Alas!..." He came up to me and said roguishly-- "Are the poems you compose the same style of thing as his?" "No, monsieur." "Ah! I thought not. Piron was a gay young dog!... I saw him at Madame de Montesson's.... I suppose you never knew Madame de Montesson, did you?" "Yes, I did, monsieur; my father took me to her house when I was quite a child." "She was a charming woman, monsieur, a charming woman, and she entertained the best society of Paris." "Now, monsieur," I asked, "will you please give me some fresh work?" "What work?" "Why! any work." "But there is no more to do!" "What! nothing else to do?" "No, since you have finished everything." "But what, then, am I to do?"