nearly two o’clock
It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme ; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together . Try to picture the workshop , lighted at either end , and dark in the middle ; the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years ; the cobweb of cordage across the ceiling , the stacks of paper , the old-fashioned presses , the pile of slabs for weighting the damp sheets , the rows of cases , and the two dens in the far corners where the master printer and foreman sat -- and you will have some idea of the life led by the two friends . One day early in May , 1821 , David and Lucien were standing together by the window that looked into the yard . It was nearly two o'clock , and the four or five men were going out to dinner . David waited until the apprentice had shut the street door with the bell fastened to it ; then he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the smell of paper , ink , and presses and old woodwork had grown intolerable to him , and together they sat down under the vines , keeping the office and the door in view . The sunbeams , playing among the trellised vine-shoots , hovered over the two poets , making , as it were , an aureole about their heads , bringing the contrast between their faces and their characters into a vigorous relief that would have tempted the brush of some great painter . David 's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter , the man born to struggle in obscurity , or with the eyes of all men turned upon him .