During my absence a place had been offered me as second or third clerk, I do not know exactly which, with M. Lefèvre, a lawyer at Crespy. It was a very desirable place, because the clerks were lodged and boarded. My keep had become such a burden on my poor mother, that she consented for the second time to part with me in order to save my food. She made up my little bit of packing—not much bigger than a Savoyard's on leaving his mountains—and off I set. It was three and a half leagues from Villers-Cotterets to Crespy: I did the journey on foot one fine evening, and I duly arrived at M. Lefèvre's.
M. Lefèvre was, at that period, a fairly good-looking man of thirty-four or thirty-five, with dark brown hair, a very pale complexion, and a well-worn appearance physically. You could recognise he was a man who had lived a long while in Paris, who had taken many permissible pleasures, and still more forbidden ones. Although M. Lefèvre was confined to a little provincial town, he might be styled a lawyer of the old school: he had ceremonious ways with his clients, ceremonious manners with us, lofty domineering airs with the world at large. M. Lefèvre seemed to say to all those who had business with him, "Pray appreciate the honour I am bestowing upon you and your town, in condescending to be a lawyer in the capital of a canton when I might have been in practice in Paris."
There was one thing that specially called forth from me feelings of admiration for M. Lefèvre, and it was this: he went to the capital, as they call it in Crespy, some eight or ten times a year, and he never lowered himself to take the diligence: when he wanted a conveyance he would call the gardener. "Pierre," he would say, "I am going to-morrow, or this evening, to Paris; see that the post-horses are ready in the chaise at such and such an hour."
Pierre would go: at the appointed hour the horses would arrive, rousing the whole district with their bells; the postillion, who still wore a powdered wig and a blue jacket with red lapels and silver buttons, would fling himself clumsily, heavily-booted, into the saddle, M. Lefèvre would stretch himself nonchalantly in the carriage, wrapped in a big cloak, take a pinch of snuff from a gold box, and say with an air of careless indifference, "Go on!" and at the word the whip cracked, the bells jingled and the carriage disappeared round the corner of the street for three or four days. M. Lefèvre never told us the day or hour of his return: he would return unawares, for he delighted in taking his world by surprise.
But M. Lefèvre was not a bad sort of man. Although cold and exacting, he was just; he rarely refused holidays when they were asked for, but, as we shall see, he never pardoned holidays taken without leave.
My brother-in-law's mother lived at Crespy, so I had a ready entree into the society of that little town. Alas! alas! what a different world it was from our three-tiered society of Villers-Cotterets of which I have spoken, and above all from our own charming little circle of friends! All the good family of Millet, with whom we had taken shelter during the first invasion, had disappeared: the mother, the two brothers, the two sisters, had all left Crespy and lived in Paris. I have since come across the mother and the eldest sister: they were both in want. I was dreadfully bored in the heart of that ancient capital of Valois! so sick of it that I very often returned home to sleep at my mother's at Villers-Cotterets, when Saturday evening came, taking my gun for a shoot on the way; then I would shoulder my gun at six on Monday morning, and, shooting all the time, I returned to Maître Lefèvre's before the office opened.
Thus things went on for three months. I had a pretty room looking into a garden full of flowers; the evening sun shone into the room; I had paper, ink and pens in abundance on my table; the food was good, I looked well enough, and yet I felt I could not possibly continue to live thus.
During one of my Sunday excursions I turned in the direction of Ermenonville. Ermenonville is about six leagues from Crespy, but what were six leagues to such legs as mine! I visited the historic places of M. de Girardin, the desert, the poplar island, the tomb of the Unknown. The poetic side to this pilgrimage revived my poor drooping Muse a little, like a wan, sickly butterfly coming out of its chrysalis in January instead of May. I set to work. I wrote partly in prose, partly in verse, and under the inspiration of a charming young society damsel named Athénaïs—who knew nothing about it-a bad imitation of the Lettres d'Émilie by Demoustier, and of the Voyages du chevalier Berlin. I sent the work to Adolphe when it was finished. Since I could not achieve success by the stage, I might perhaps attain it by publishing. I gave it the essentially novel title of Pélerinage à Ermenonville. Adolphe, naturally enough, could not do anything with it; he lost it, never found it again, and so much the better. I cannot recollect a single word of it.
As a matter of fact, Adolphe was not succeeding any better than I was. All his hopes fell to the ground, one after another, and he wrote me that we should never do anything unless we were together. But, to be together, it would be necessary to leave Crespy for Paris, and how was this to be done, in the state of my purse, which even on those happy days when my mother sent me some money never contained more than eight or ten francs.