I do not remember ever to have had a more perfect impression of contentment. We dined pleasantly--two good courses, that was all; a dinner without pretence, where we served ourselves with the pepper-mill. The charming Madame Miraz presided with her bright smile, having her child by her side in a high-chair. She spoke but little, but her sweet and intelligent attention followed our light and paradoxical chat, the good-humored fooling of men of letters; and at the dessert she took a rose from the bouquet which ornamented the table, and placed it in her hair near her ear with a supreme grace. She was indeed that lovely and silent friend whom a dreamer requires. We took our coffee in the study--they intended to furnish the salon very soon with the price of a story to be published by Levy--then, as the evening was cool, a fire of sticks and twigs was built, and while we smoked, Miraz and I, recalling old memories, the mistress of the house, holding on her knees little Helen, now ready for bed, made her repeat "Our Father" and "Hail Mary," which the little one lisped, rubbing her little feet together before the warm flame. * * * * * We saw each other again, often at first, then less frequently, the difficult and complicated life of literary labor taking us each his own way. So the years passed. We met, shook hands. "Everything going well?" "Splendidly." And that was all. Then, later, I found the name of Louis Miraz but rarely in the journals and periodicals. "Happy man; he is resting," I said to myself, remembering that he was spoken of as having made a small fortune. Finally, last autumn, I learned that he was seriously ill. I hurried to see him. He still lived at the Enclos des Ternes; but on this sombre day of the last of November the little house seemed cold, and looked naked among the leafless trees. It seemed to me shrunken and diminished, like everything that we have not seen for a long time. The dog was probably dead, for his bark no longer answered the sound of the bell when I passed the little gate and entered the garden, all strewn with dead leaves where the night's frost had withered the last chrysanthemums. It was not Madame Miraz--she was absent--it was Helen who received me, Helen, who had grown to be a great girl of fourteen, with an awkward manner. She opened for me the door of her father's study, and brusquely lifting her great black eyelashes, turned on me a timid and distressed glance. I found Miraz huddled in an easy-chair in the corner of the fireplace, wrapped in a sort of bed-gown, with gray locks streaking his long hair; and by the cold, clammy hand which he reached towards me, by the pallid face which he turned upon me, I knew that he was lost. Horrible! I found in my unhappy comrade that worn and ruined look which used to strike us formerly among the poor Poles of the cremerie. [Illustration] "Ah, well, old man, things are not going well?"