LXXXIV.
I returned to my room in despair. The child and the dog wondered, for the first time, at my sullen silence, and at the gloom that overspread my countenance. I lighted the stove, and threw in, sheet by sheet, my whole volume, without sparing a single page. "Since thou canst not purchase for me a single day of life and love," I exclaimed, as I watched it burning, "what care I if the immortality of my name be consumed with thee? Love, not fame, is my immortality."
That same evening, I went out at nightfall. I sold my poor mother's diamond. Till then I had kept it, in the hope that my verses might have redeemed its value, and that I might preserve it untouched. As I handed it to the jeweller, I kissed it by stealth, and wet it with my tears. He seemed affected himself, and felt convinced that the diamond was honestly mine by the grief I testified in disposing of it. The thirty louis he gave me for it fell from my hands as I reckoned them, as if the gold had been the price of a sacrilege. Oh, how many diamonds, twenty times superior in price, would I not often have given since, to repurchase that same diamond, unique in my eyes!—a fragment of my mother's heart, one of the last teardrops from her eye, the light of her love!… On what hand does it sparkle now?…