During the
greater part of the day, they lay and played together on the mat at my
feet beneath my table. At a later period I took away the dog with me
from Paris, and kept it many years, as a loving and faithful memento of
those days of solitude. I lost him in 1820, not without tears, in
traversing the forests of the Pontine Marshes between Rome and
Terracina. The poor child is become a man, and has learned the art of
engraving, which he practices ably at Lyons. My name having resounded
since, even in his shop, he came to see me, and wept with joy at
beholding me, and with grief at hearing of the loss of the dog. Poor
heart of man! that ever requires what it has once loved, and that sheds
tears of the same water, for the loss of an empire, or for the loss of
an animal.
LXIV.
During the thousands of hours in which I was thus confined between the
stove, the screen, the window, the child, and the dog, I read over all
that antiquity has written and bequeathed to us, except the poets, with
whom we had been surfeited at school, and in whose verses our wearied
eyes saw but the caaesura, and the long or short syllables.
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