Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/290

Jacques’s father, who got into a fearful rage, and asked when they would finish bothering him.

The sister of charity, who was present at this horrible discussion, cast a glance at the corpse, and uttered these simple and feeling words:

“Oh! sir, you cannot have him buried like that, poor fellow, it is so cold. Give him at least a shirt, that he may not arrive quite naked before ha God.”

The father gave five francs to the friend to get a shirt, but recommended him to go to a wardrobe shop in the Rue Grange-aux-Belles, where they sold second-hand linen.

“It will be cheaper there,” said he.

This cruelty on the part of Jacques’s father was explained to me later on. He was furious because his son had chosen an artistic career, and his anger remained unappeased even in the presence of a coffin.

But I am very far from Mademoiselle Francine and her muff. I will return to them. Mademoiselle Francine was the first and only mistress of Jacques, who did not die very old, for he was scarcely three-and-twenty when his father would have had him laid naked in the earth. The story of his love was told me by Jacques himself when he was No. 14 and I was No. 16 in the Sainte Victoire ward—an ugly spot to die in.

Ah! reader, before I begin this story, which would be a touching one if I could tell it as it was told to me by my friend Jacques, let me take a pull or two at the old clay pipe he gave me on the day that the doctor forbade its use by him. Yet at night, when the male nurse was asleep, my friend Jacques would borrow his pipe with a little tobacco from me. It is so wearisome at night in those vast wards, when one suffers and cannot sleep.

“Only two or three whiffs,” he would say, and I would let him have it; and Sister Sainte-Geneviève did not seem