Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/242

“Oh! little Mimi, joy of my home, is it really true that you are gone, that I have driven you away, and that I shall never see you again, my God? Oh! pretty brown curly head that has slept so long on this spot, will you never come back to sleep here again? Oh! capricious voice, whose caresses rendered me delirious and whose anger charmed me, shall I never hear you again? Oh! little white hands with the blue veins, little white hands to whom I had affianced my lips, have you too received my last kiss?”

And Rodolphe, in delirious intoxication, plunged his head amongst the pillows, still impregnated with the perfume of his love’s hair. From the depth of the alcove he seemed to see emerge the ghosts of the sweet nights he had passed with his young mistress. He heard clear and sonorous, amidst the nocturnal silence, the open-hearted laugh of Mademoiselle Mimi, and he thought of the charming and contagious gaiety with which she had been able so many times to make him forget all the troubles and all the hardships of their hazardous existence.

Throughout the night he kept passing in review the eight months that he had just spent with this girl, who had never loved him perhaps, but whose tender lies had restored to Rodolphe’s heart its first youth and virility.

Dawn surprised him at the moment when, conquered by fatigue, he had just closed his eyes, red from the tears shed during the night. A doleful and terrible vigil, yet such a one as even the most sneering and skeptical amongst us may find in the depths of their past.

When his friends called on him in the morning they were alarmed at the sight of Rodolphe, whose face bore the traces of all the anguish that had awaited him during his vigil in the Gethsemane of love.

“Good!” said Marcel, “ I was sure of it; it is his mirth