“Ah!” cried De Nani, “is this a harp I hear, or the voice of a mortal man?”
“Have you read my little poem,” continued Gaillard, “commencing,
“O Love, whose every golden tress The sunshine holds of loveliness, What tragedy in what dark dawn Hath lent thine eyes such mournfulness? O——”
“Oh, stop!” said Toto. “Your poetry makes me want to commit suicide.”
“That,” said Gaillard, “shows but the beauty of it. My ambition is to write a quatrain that will be as poisonous to hope as strychnine. Hope, that accursed allurement born of the——Heaven! I am going to be ill; I have swallowed a bad oyster.” “Run to the window,” commanded Toto.
“I am better,” declared the poet. “The taste has passed. The question is, Will it prove poisonous? _Mon Dieu!_ and the proofs of my ‘Fall of the Damned’ are not corrected.”
“Never mind,” said Toto gloomily. “You can correct them as you are falling. Oh, what a wretched world this is! I’m going to drown myself in the Seine.” He rose, yawning, from his chair. “Who will follow me?”
“I will as far as the door,” said Struve, rising also. “Pelisson, where are you for?”
“Home and go to bed,” said Pelisson, rising also. “M. de Nani—why, he’s drunk again!”
M. le Marquis de Nani had risen from his seat, and seemed trying to walk upstairs through the air. It was the back blow of the night.
“I never saw a man slip into drink, like a girl into her shift, so swiftly and with such divine simplicity,” lisped Struve. “Do wash his face, someone; he is painted like a _demi-mondaine_, and the paint has broken loose over his nose. Can’t possibly take him into the street such a disgraceful figure.”
They washed De Nani’s face with white wine and Toto’s handkerchief, whilst the old man struggled and resisted like a child. It was a mournful spectacle, and Toto did not laugh as the others did.
“That’s what’s the end of all,” he thought. “Eugh! what a beastly thing life is!”
“Now put on his hat,” commanded Pelisson, who acted as master of the ceremonies, “and jam it down—that’s right. I will carry his cane. Drive him before you, and call a cab,” he cried to the _garçon_, handing him a napoleon for _pourboire_.
They got the old man into a fiacre, weeping and protesting and fighting like a lunatic with his keepers.