All this bustle served to increase the fuss attendant upon my appearance. I became the fashion. My head was turned: I was unaccustomed to the delights of self-love and became intoxicated with it I loved fame like a woman, like a first love. And yet, coward that I was, my affright equalled my passion: I was a conscript and stood the fire badly. My natural timidity, the doubts I have always had of my talent, made me humble in the midst of my triumphs. I shrank from my splendour; I wandered in lonely places, trying to extinguish the halo with which my head was crowned. In the evenings, with my hat thrust down over my eyes, lest the great man should be recognised, I went to a public smoking-room to read my praises in secret, in some small, unknown paper. Alone with my renown, I prolonged my walks as far as the steam-pump at Chaillot[388], on the same road where I had suffered so much on going to Court: I was no more at my ease with my new honours. When my superiority dined for thirty sous in the Latin Quarter it swallowed its food the wrong way, troubled as it was by the staring of which it thought itself the object. I watched myself, I said to myself: "And yet it is you, extraordinary being, eating like any one else!" In the Champs-Élysées was a café which I liked because of some nightingales which hung in a cage inside the coffee-room; Madame Rousseau, who kept the place, knew me by sight, without knowing who I was. At ten o'clock in the evening, they used to bring me a cup of coffee, and I looked for _Atala_ in the _Petites-Affiches_, to the sound of the voices of my half-dozen Philomelas. Alas! I soon saw poor Madame Rousseau die; our society of the nightingales and of the fair Indian who sang, "Sweet habit of loving, so needful to life!" lasted but a moment.