As we were in the same class, and as we went to and from the Lyceum together, my mother willingly permitted me to pass whole hours with this charming lad, who soon shared my taste for the verses which I so much admired, and my desire to know more of their authors. On our way to the college, we took the narrow streets of the old town and passed the stall of an old bookseller of whom we had bought some second-hand classics. We discovered here a copy of the poetry of Musset in rather a bad condition, which would cost forty sous. At first we contented ourselves with occasional readings at the stall, but soon we felt that it was impossible to do without it. By putting together our spending money for two weeks, we were able to buy it, and then, in Emile’s little room, he on his bed and I on a chair, we read Don Paez, the Marrons du feu, Portia, Mardoche and Rolla. I trembled as if I were committing a great fault, and we imbibed this poetry as if it had been wine, slowly, sweetly, passionately. I read afterward in this same room, and also in my own, thanks to the ruses of a lover in danger, many clandestine volumes which I very much enjoyed, from the “Peau de chagrin,” of Balzac, to the “Fleurs du mal,” of Baudelaire, not to mention the poems of Heinrich Heine and the romances of Stendhal. I have never felt an emotion comparable to that of my first encounter with the genius of the author of “Rolla.” I was neither an artist nor a historian. Was I therefore indifferent to their value more or less real or their meaning more or less actual? Not at all. This was an elder brother who had come to reveal to me the dangerous world of sentimental experience. The intellectual inferiority of piety to impiety which I had obscurely felt appeared now in a strangely new light. All the virtues that had been preached to me in my childhood seemed poor and mean and humble, and meaner beside the opulence and the frenzy of certain vices. The devotees who were my mother’s friends, sadly old and shriveled, represented faith. Impiety was a handsome young man who awakes and looks at the crimson aurora, and in a glance discovers the whole horizon of history and legends, and then again lays his head on the bosom of a girl as beautiful as his most beautiful dream. Chastity and marriage were the _bourgeois_ whom I knew who went to hear the music in the Jardin des Plantes, every Thursday and Sunday, and who said the same things in the same way. My imagination painted, in the chimerical colors of the most burning poetry, the faces of the libertines of the Contes d’Espagne and of the fragments which follow. There was Dalti murdering the husband of Portia, then wandering with his mistress over the dark waters of the lagoon among the stairways of the antique palaces. There were Don Paez assassinating Juana after folding her to himself in a fond embrace; Frank and his Belcolore, Hassan and his Namouna, l’Abbé Cassio and his Luzon.