Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/381
Is used to furnish forth its epitaph,
Gay as a sexton digging his own grave
I burst into a wild and frantic laugh;
The pen I grasped was trembling as I wrote;
And, even while I laughed, a scalding rain
Of tears turned all the writing to a blot.
It was the 24th of December, and that evening the Latin Quarter bore a special aspect. Since four o’clock in the afternoon the pawnbroking establishments and the shops of the second-hand clothes dealers and booksellers had been encumbered by a noisy crowd, who, later in the evening, took the ham and beef shops, cook-shops, and grocers by assault. The shopmen, even if they had had a hundred arms, like Briareus, would not have sufficed to serve the customers who struggled with one another for provisions. At the baker’s they formed a string as in times of dearth. The wine-shop keepers got rid of the produce of three vintages, and a clever statistician would have found it difficult to reckon up the number of knuckles of ham and of sausages which were sold at the famous shop of Borel, in the Rue Dauphine. In this one evening Daddy Cretaine, nicknamed Petit-Pain, exhausted eighteen editions of his cakes. All night long sounds of rejoicing broke out from the lodging-houses, the windows of which were brilliantly lit up, and an atmosphere of revelry filled the district.
The old festival of Christmas Eve was being celebrated.
That evening, towards ten o’clock, Marcel and Rodolphe were proceeding homeward somewhat sadly. Passing up the Rue Dauphine they noticed a great crowd in the shop of a provision dealer, and halted a moment before the window. Tantalized by the sight of the toothsome gastronomic products, the two Bohemians resembled, during this con-