And so her young footman, sent packing by her, did not know what to do with himself, and not content with having copied the butler’s example and supplied himself with notepaper from my desk had begun as well to borrow volumes of poetry from my bookshelves. He sat reading them for a good half of the day, out of admiration for the poets who had written them, but also so as, during the rest of his time, to begem with quotations the letters which he wrote to his friends in his native village. Naturally he expected these to dazzle them. But as there was little sequence in his ideas he had formed the notion that these poems, picked out at random from my shelves, were matters of common knowledge, to which it was customary to refer. So much so that in writing to these peasants, whose stupefaction he discounted, he interspersed his own reflections with lines from Lamartine, just as he might have said “Who laughs last, laughs longest!” or merely “How are you keeping?”