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For instance, Jane was naturally intrepid; she never refused, and nothing frightened her, but after a few months of cohabitation with Blanche her character changed and she manifested at times sudden and inexplicable fear. Her companion, much less brave, must have told her ghost stories at night. Often, when going through the Bois de Boulogne at dusk or after dark, Blanche would stop short or shy, as if a phantom, invisible to me, had risen up before her. She trembled in every limb, breathed hard, and broke out into sweat. If I attempted to urge her ahead with the whip, she backed, and all Jane could do, strong as she was, was insufficient to induce her to go on. One of us would have to get down, cover her eyes with the hand and lead her until the vision had vanished. Little by little Jane became subject to the same terror, the reason of which, no doubt, Blanche told her once they were back in their stable. I may as well confess that for my part, when I would be driving down a dark road on which the moonlight produced alternations of light and shadow, and Blanche suddenly became rooted to the spot as though a spectre had sprung at her head, and refused to move,–she who was usually so docile that Queen Mab’s whip, made of a cricket’s bone with a spider’s thread for a thong, was enough to start her into a gallop,–I could not repress a slight shudder or refrain from peering into the darkness rather anxiously, while at times the harmless trunks of ash or birch trees would appear to me as spectral-looking as one of Goya’s “Caprices.”

I took great delight in driving these dear animals myself, and we soon became very intimate. It was merely as a matter of form that I held the reins, for the least click of the tongue was enough to direct them, to turn them to the right or the left, to make them go faster, or to stop them. They quickly learned all my habits and started of themselves for the office, the printer’s, the publishers’, the Bois de Boulogne, and the houses where I went to dinner on certain days of the week, and this so accurately that they would have ended by compromising me, for they would have revealed the places to which I paid the most mysterious visits. If I happened to forget the time in the course of an interesting or tender conversation they would remind me it was getting late by neighing or pawing in front of the balcony.

Although I greatly enjoyed traversing the city in the phaeton drawn by my two friends, I could not help at times thinking the north wind sharp and the rain cold when the months came along which the Republican calendar named so appropriately the months of mist, of frost, of rain, of wind, of snow (brumaire, frimaire, pluviose, ventose, nivose), so I purchased a small blue coupe, lined with white reps, which was likened to the equipage of the famous dwarf of the day, a piece of impertinence I did not mind. A brown coupe, lined with garnet, followed the blue one, and was itself replaced by a dark-green coupe lined with dark blue, for I actually did sport a coach–I, poor newspaper writer holding no Government stock–for five or six years. And my ponies were none the less fat and in good condition though they were fed on literature, had substantives for oats, adjectives for hay, and adverbs for straw. But alas! there came, no one knows very well why, the Revolution in February; a great many paving-stones were picked up for patriotic purposes, and Paris became rather unfit for carriage travel. I could of course have escaladed the barricades with my agile steeds and my light equipage, but it was only at the cook-shop that I could get credit, and I could not possibly feed my horses on roast chicken. The horizon was dark with heavy clouds, through which flashed red gleams. Money had taken fright and gone into hiding; the Presse, on the staff of which I was, had suspended publication, and I was glad enough to find a person willing to buy my horses, harness, and carriages for a fourth of their value. It was a bitter grief to me, and I would not venture to say that no tears ran down my cheeks on to the manes of Jane and Blanche when they were led away. Sometimes their new owner would drive past the house; I always knew their quick, sharp trot at a distance, and always the sudden way they would stop under my windows proved that they had not forgotten the place where they had been so tenderly loved and so well cared for, and a sigh would break responsive from me as I said to myself: “Poor Jane, poor Blanche! I wonder if they are happy.”

And the loss of them is the one and only thing I felt sore over when I lost my slender fortune.