Thus I found myself promoted to a new service, without even being allowed to consider whether it would interfere with my studies or not, for I often brought into the salon some of my books that I might study a little without leaving Lucien. But I did not for a moment think of evading this task. First the brusqueness of the marquis had brought me a glance almost supplicating from Charlotte, one of those glances by which a woman knows how to ask pardon, for the error of some one whom she loves. Then, a new project took form in my mind. Might not this task be utilized to the profit of the enterprise commenced, abandoned, and which the look of Mlle. de Jussat made me think was still possible? To the question of the marquis upon the choice of the book, I responded that I would consider. And I looked for a work which would permit me to approach the prey around which I turned, as I once saw, near the Puy du Dôme, a kite wheel around and above a poor little bird. Was not this an opportunity to try by another method this influence of imitation, which I had vainly hoped from my false confidence? It is to you, my dear master, that we owe the strongest pages which have been written upon that which you so justly call the Literary Mind, upon this unconscious modeling of our heart to the resemblance of the passions painted by the poets. I saw in this then, a means of acting upon Charlotte which I reproached myself for not having thought of before. But how was I to find a romance which was passionate enough to excite her, and outwardly correct enough to be read before the assembled family? I literally ransacked the library. Its incoherent and contrasted composition, reflected the residence of its successive masters and the chances of their taste. There were all the principal works of the eighteenth century of which I have spoken--then a hiatus. During the emigration the château had remained unoccupied. Then a lot of romantic books in their first editions attested the literary aspirations of the father of the marquis, who had been the friend of Lamartine. Then came the worst of contemporaneous romances, those which are bought on the railway, half-bound, cut sometimes with the finger, or a page lost, and some treatises on political economy, an abandoned hobby of M. de Jussat. At last I discovered amid all this rubbish a “Eugénie Grandet,” which appeared to me to fill the conditions desired. There is nothing more attractive to a fresh imagination than these idyls at once chaste and fervid in which innocence envelops passion in a penumbra of poesy. But the marquis must have known this celebrated romance by heart, and I apprehended that he would refuse to listen to it.