In the evening, when he had retired to the little nook where he slept, and hung his lamp at the head of his strap-bedstead, he would find Miette on every page of the dusty old volume which he had taken at random from a shelf above his head and was reading devoutly.

He never came across a young girl, a good and beautiful creature, in his reading, without immediately identifying her with his sweetheart.

And he would set himself in the narrative as well.

If he were reading a love story, it was he who married Miette at the end, or died with her.

If, on the contrary, he were perusing some political pamphlet, some grave dissertation on social economy, works which he preferred to romances, for he had that singular partiality for difficult subjects which characterises persons of imperfect scholarship, he still found some means of associating her with the tedious themes which frequently he could not even understand.