You may have already guessed that this beautiful girl was the one who was to become my wife two years later, the ever-attentive, often-worried companion of my life, the witness of my weaknesses as well as of my bursts of energy, of my sorrows and my joys. With her I have gone up the steps of life, already long, but not so steep as those which led to Ara Coeli, that altar of the skies which recalls to Rome the pure and cloudless celestial abodes, which have led me along a way sometimes difficult and where the roses have been gathered in the midst of thorns. But is not life always so? In the following spring came the pensionnaires' annual entertainment, which took place as was customary at Castel Fusano on the Roman Campagna, a couple of miles from Ostia in a magnificent pine forest divided by an avenue of beautiful evergreen oaks. I brought away with me such an agreeable remembrance of the day that I advised my fiancée and her family to make the acquaintance of this incomparable spot. In that splendid avenue paved with old marble slabs I recalled Gaston Boissier's story, in his "Promenades Archelogiques," of Nisus and Euraylus, those unfortunate young men who were sent to their downfall by Volscens, as he came from Laurentium, to bring part of his troops to Turnus. The thought that in December my two years' stay would be up and that I would have to leave the Villa Medici and return to France made me extremely sad. I wanted to see Venice again. I stayed there two months and during the time I jotted down the rough sketch of my first _Suite d'Orchestra_. I noted the strange and beautiful notes of the Austrian trumpets which sounded every evening as they closed the gates for the night. And I used them twenty-five years later in the fourth act of _Le Cid_. My comrades bade me good-by on December seventeenth, not only at the last sad dinner at our large table, but also at the station in the evening. I had given over the day to packing, gazing meditatively the while at the bed in which I should never sleep again. All the souvenirs of my two years in Rome--palms from Palm Sunday, a drum from the Transtévère, my mandolin, a wooden Virgin, a few sprays and branches from the Villa's garden, all my souvenirs of a past which would be with me always, went into my trunk with my clothes. The French Embassy paid the carriage. I was unwilling to leave my window until the setting sun had disappeared behind St. Peter's. It seemed as if Rome in its turn took refuge in shadow--a shadow which bade me farewell. CHAPTER VII MY RETURN TO PARIS