In _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, “personnage imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life, and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter, studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk. So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet and editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a publisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend. It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!”