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One day early in May�� 1821�� David and Lucien were standing together by the window that looked into the yard. It was nearly two o'clock�� and the four or five men were going out to dinner. David waited until the apprentice had shut the street door with the bell fastened to it�� then he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the smell of paper�� ink�� and presses and old woodwork had grown intolerable to him�� and together they sat down under the vines�� keeping the office and the door in view. The sunbeams�� playing among the trellised vine-shoots�� hovered over the two'poets�� making�� as it were�� an aureole about their heads�� bringing the contrast between their faces and their characters into a vigorous relief that would have tempted the brush of some great painter.
����David's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter�� the man born to struggle in obscurity�� or with the eyes of all men turned upon him. The strong shoulders�� rising above the broad chest�� were in keeping with the full development ofhis whole frame. With his thick crop of black hair�� his fleshy�� highcolored�� swarthy face�� supported by a thick neck�� he looked at first sight like one of Boileau's canons�� but on a second glance there was that in the lines about the thick lips�� in the dimple of the chin�� in the turn of the square nostrils�� with the broad irregular line of central cleavage�� and�� above all�� in the eyes�� with the steady light of an all-absorbing love that burned in them�� which revealed the real character of the manthe wisdom of the thinker�� the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that discerns the horizon on either side�� and sees clearly to the end of winding ways�� turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of fruition�� known as yet in idea alone�� and quick to turn from them in disgust. You might look for the fiash of genius from such a face�� you could not miss the ashes of the volcano�� hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense ofthe social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer�� who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work�� close to this Silenus��joyless�� self-sustained�� drinking deep draughts from the cup of knfowledge and ofpoetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain�� stood Lucien�� graceful as some sculptured Indian Bacchus.
����For in Lucien's face there was the distinction of line which stamps the beauty of the antique�� the Greek profile�� with the velvet whiteness of women's faces�� and eyes full of love�� eyes so blue that they looked dark against a pearly setting�� and dewy and fresh as those of a child. Those beautiful eyes looked out from under their long chestnut lashes�� beneath eyebrows that might have been traced by a Chinese pencil. The silken down on his cheeks�� like his bright curling hair�� shone golden in the sunlight. A divine graciousness transfused the white temples that caught that golden gleam�� a matchless nobleness had set its seal in the short chin raised�� but not abruptly. The smile that hovered about the coral lips�� yet redder as they seemed by force of contrast with the even teeth�� was the smile ofsome sorrowing angel. Lucien's hands denoted race�� they were shapely hands�� hands that men obey at a sign�� and women love to kiss. Lucien was slender and of middle height. From a glance at his feet�� he might have been taken for a girl in disguise�� and this so much the more easily from the feminine contour of the hips�� a characteristic of keen-witted�� not to say�� astute�� men. This is a trait which seldom misleads�� and in
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