Had Célestin lived in a romance, she would doubtless have cast her light on womanhood. She would have elevated Garnier, and he certainly would have been none the worse for that. In reality, however, her effulgence showed him nothing but herself. She had such pretty ways. Her slightest movement had a deeply artistic meaning. She interpreted unspoken sentences with a motion of her hands. A poppy swaying in the wind had not the grace of Célestin crossing the floor to put the little kettle on the stove. Her talk seemed a strange sister of Dodor’s song. And then the way she had of casting her eyes up to heaven! Her gaze always seemed to return bluer from that journey, and filled with light gathered from the ghostly distance. She was all those twelve children he had longed for rolled into one, and much more besides. She was one of those delightful little cherubs over the fonts in the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois; she was the wind that waved the trees at Barbizon, the flowers that blew to the wind, and the sparrows that flew in the street; she was Mistigris, the cat who lived under his bed, and each of Mistigris’s six kittens. For all of these things that he loved when he thought of, beheld, or felt them, reminded him of Célestin. He labored away over his tulip, carving at it with infinite care. Castanet came and kicked at his door, and asked him what he was doing, and then he felt the eye of Castanet peering through the key-hole, and heard his voice informing Floquet that Garnier was writing a letter to his sweetheart. Then the banjo struck up, and the doleful sound of the comb laboring out “Partant pour la Syrie” mixed with the sound of Lorillard washing his shirt and beating it between his hands as a sort of accompaniment to the music. Then the flower was at last accomplished—a bit too thick in the petal, perhaps, but still a fairly accurate representation. He dyed it with the cochineal, and mounted it on a little green stick he had prepared to do duty for a stalk. It was a poor child for so great an artist to produce, yet he smiled at it in a satisfied manner, for it reminded him of Célestin. He then went to the atelier of Castanet & Co. to see if he could get a piece of fish for Mistigris, who had come out from under the bed with a kitten in her mouth, as if to remind him that she was the mother of a family and required sustaining. And when he had fed her, he darted off with the tulip in his hand, making for the Rue de Perpignan, regardless of the ribaldry of his compatriots, who were watching him from their window away up near the roof. He hurried along like a man pursuing fortune, or as if fearful that the tulip would wither. Toto was out, but Célestin was at home mending a glove. “Ah, _ciel_!” cried Célestin, as she held the tulip out between finger and thumb. “What a marvelous thing! You made it, and from a turnip! It is a miracle!”