To Jean, healthy, rational, and cheerful as a young terrier, much that Grégoire said and did was totally incomprehensible, but what he did not understand he set down, with conviction, to the eccentricity of genius. The long nights which he spent alone, sleeping sanely in their bedroom in the rue de Seine, while Grégoire's cot stood empty beside him, and Grégoire himself was tramping the streets of Paris; the return of his friend in the first faint light of dawn, pale-faced and swaying; the succeeding hours which, despite his exhaustion, he spent at his desk, feverishly writing, and tossing the pages from him, one by one, until the floor was strewn with them on all sides; finally, his heavy slumber far into the afternoon,--all this, to Jean, was but part and parcel of that marvelous thing called literature. He returned at seven to find that Grégoire had prepared a wonderful little meal, and was walking up and down the floor, unevenly, absinthe in hand, awaiting his arrival. In the two hours which followed lay the keynote of their sympathy. It was then that Grégoire would read his work of the early morning hour, to Jean, curled up on the divan, with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes round and wide with delight and admiration. What things they were, those fancies that Grégoire had pursued and caught, like night-moths, in the streets of Paris, while stupid folk were sleeping! And how he read them, Grégoire, with his flushed face lit with inspiration, and his eyes flaming with enthusiasm! If only he would not drink absinthe, thought little Jean, and said so, timidly at first, and then more earnestly, as, little by little, the marks of excess grew more plain in his friend. But Grégoire made a joke of this--he who always joked--and in time, Jean came to acquiesce. For he never wholly understood--until afterwards. So, when nine struck, it was understood that they parted company till the following evening. Jean brought out his drawing board, his T square, and all their attendant paraphernalia, and toiled at his calques with infinite patience and unerring accuracy, until midnight; and Grégoire, having corrected his manuscript here and there, gnawing savagely at his pencil the while, inclosed it in one of his long envelopes, scrawled "Rédaction du Journal" upon it, stamped it, and went out into the night to mail the old, and seek new moths. And this was all there was to the comradeship which mystified the Quartier, save that the love of Jean for Grégoire and of Grégoire for Jean was as deep and unfaltering as the current of the eternal Seine--and, if anything, more silent!