Hugo and Lamartine, the two kings of poetry, the peaceful Eteocles and Polynices of Art, one bearing the sceptre of the ode and the other the crown of elegy. Alas! and alas! what has become of all those who gathered there? Fontanay and Alfred Johannot are dead; de Vigny has made himself invisible; Taylor is given over to his travels; Lamartine, with his provisional government, has let France slip through his fingers; Hugo is a deputy and strives to hold the country together, a task that proved too difficult for his colleague's hands; and the rest of us are all scattered, each following his own laborious career, hampered with spiteful enemies, harassing laws and petty ministerial hatreds; we struggle on, blindfold and weary, towards that new world which Providence is preserving for our sons and our grandsons, which we shall not see, but towards which at least our tombs, like milestones, will point the way. Let us go back to our salon, into which those of whom I have just been speaking were now entering, hailed with effusive greetings of delight. If Nodier, when he left the dinner-table, went and stretched himself out in his arm-chair by the fireside, it was because he liked, after the fashion of the egoistic Sybarite he was, to enjoy at his ease some chance play of his imagination, during that blissful moment which follows in the wake of coffee; if, on the other hand, making an effort to remain standing, he leant against the chimneypiece, his calves to the fire and his back to the mirror, it meant he was going to tell some of his stories. We were then all on the _qui vive_ to smile at the anecdotes which were to drop from those finely modelled, satirical and witty lips; everybody kept silence; and he would pour forth one of the delightful stories of his youth, which sounded like a romance of Longus, or an idyll of Theocritus. He seemed like Walter Scott and Perrault; the savant grappling with the poet, memory battling with imagination. Nodier was not merely amusing to listen to, but in addition he was delightful to watch. His tall, lean body, his long thin arms, his white tapering hands, his long face, full of a serene melancholy, all harmonised and fitted in with his rather languid voice, and with the afore-mentioned aristocratic accent; and, whether Nodier were reciting a love-story, or describing a fight on the plains of la Vendée, or some drama that happened in the place de la Révolution, a conspiracy of Cadoudal or of Oudet, his hearers would hold their breath to listen, so wonderfully did the story-teller know how to get at the heart of everything he described. Those who came in in the middle bowed silently and sat down in an arm-chair or leant against the wainscotting; the recital always came to an end too soon; why he ever concluded was a mystery, for we knew that Nodier could draw eternally on that purse of Fortunatus which we call imagination. We did not applaud,--do we applaud the murmur of a stream, the song of a bird,