It was but a half-gaiety, in truth, that awoke in the poet even now,
with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along
the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of
his later life was already gathering. The dead!--he was coming to be
on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of
"the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work
being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not
invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled
drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood
open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in
silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never
to be finished.

Gaston, as he turned from that stolen reading of the opening verse in
jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, to the writer, let out his soul
perhaps; for the poet's face struck fire too, and seeming to detect
on a sudden the legible document of something by no means
conventional below the young man's well-controlled manner and
expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual
furtherance, and in particular for the addition of "manly power" to a
"grace" of mind, obviously there already in due sufficiency. Would
he presently carry a letter with recommendation of himself to
Monsieur Michel de Montaigne? Linked they were, in the common
friendship of the late Etienne de la Boetie yonder! Monsieur Michel
could tell him much of the great ones--of the Greek and Latin masters
of style. Let his study be in them! With what justice, by the way,
had those Latin poets dealt with winter, and wintry charms, in their
bland Italy! And just then, at the striking of a rickety great bell
of the Middle Age, in the hands of a cowled brother came the
emblazoned grace-cup, with which the Prior de Ronsard had enriched