Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/179

In the opening month of each of the four seasons there are some terrible epochs, usually about the 1st and the 15th. Rodolphe, who could not witness the approach of one or the other of these two dates without alarm, nick-named them the Cape of Storms. On these mornings it is not Aurora who opens the portals of the East, but creditors, landlords’ bailiffs and that sort of people. The day begins with a shower of bills and accounts and winds up with a hail-storm of protests. Dies iræ.

Now one morning, it was a 15th of April, Rodolphe was peacefully slumbering—and dreaming that one of his uncles had just bequeathed him a whole province in Peru, the feminine inhabitants included.

Whilst he was wallowing in this imaginary Pactolus, the sound of a key turning in the lock interrupted the heir presumptive just at the most dazzling point of his golden dream.

Rodolphe sat up in bed, his eyes and mind yet heavy with slumber, and looked about him.

He vaguely perceived standing in the middle of his room a man who had just entered.

This early visitor bore a bag slung at his back and a large pocket-book in his hand. He wore a cocked hat and a bluish-grey swallow-tailed coat and seemed very much out of breath from ascending the five flights of stairs. His manners were very affable and his steps sounded as sonorously as that of a money-changer’s counter on the march.