Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/363

“Louis! in gold?” said Colline, in a voice choked with wonderment. “Let me see what they are like.”

After which the two friends parted, Colline to go and relate the opulent ways and new loves of Rodolphe, and the latter to return home.

This took place during the week that had followed the second rupture between Rodolphe and Mademoiselle Mimi. The poet, when he had broken off with his mistress, felt a need of a change of air and surroundings, and, accompanied by his friend Marcel, he left the gloomy lodging-house, the landlord of which saw both him and Marcel depart without overmuch regret. Both, as we have said, sought quarters elsewhere, and hired two rooms in the same house and on the same floor. The room chosen by Rodolphe was incomparably more comfortable than any he had inhabited up till then. There were articles of furniture almost imposing, above all a sofa covered with red stuff, that was intended to imitate velvet, and did not.

There were also on-the mantle-piece two china vases, painted with flowers, and between these an elaborate clock, with fearful ornamentation. Rodolphe put the vases in a cupboard, and when the landlord came to wind the clock up, begged him to do nothing of the kind.

“I am willing to leave the clock on the mantel-shelf,” said he, “but only as an object of art. It points to midnight—a good hour; let it stick to it. The day it marks five minutes past I will move. A clock,” continued Rodolphe, who had never been able to submit to the imperious tyranny of the dial, “is a domestic foe who implacably reckons up your existence hour by hour and minute by minute, and says to you every moment, ‘Here is a fraction of your life gone.’ I could not sleep in peace in a room in which there was one of these instruments of torture, in the vicinity of which carelessness and reverie