The cholera was running its course, but we had arrived at the stage of getting accustomed to it. In France, alas! we get used to everything! It was even said that the best way of fighting the cholera was not to think about it but to live as far as possible in one's ordinary way. This régime suited me excellently at the period in question. I wrote Gaule et France, a work which fatigued me very much in the way of study, to such an extent that I was not sorry to forget my day's work in the evening. Every night, accordingly, I had some friends with me: Fourcade, Collin, Boulanger, Liszt, Châtillon, Hugo at times, Delanoue nearly always. We talked and talked of art; sometimes we persuaded Hugo to read us poetry; Liszt, who never required much pressing, thumped on a bad piano with all his might, and he ended by breaking it to pieces; so the evening would fly by without any one thinking any more of the cholera than if it had been at St. Petersburg or Benares or Pekin. Besides, it had been calculated that five hundred deaths per day, out of a million of men, was not quite one death per thousand, and, taking everything into consideration, one had far more chance of being one of the thousand living souls than the one dead one. This calculation, it will be seen, was exceedingly reassuring. In the midst of all this, Harel, who was at loggerheads with Hugo, came to me from time to time to tease me to write him another play. He made out that it was a most favourable time, that nothing was being a success elsewhere, and that the first-comer to make a success under such circumstances would have a run of a hundred performances.
As for the cholera, he treated it as a myth, and put it on a level with the ghosts of Semiramis and of Hamlet; he put a bit of paper into his snuff-box to remind himself that he was in Paris. The object of his pursuing me with such determination was a drama entitled La Tour de Nesle, in which he said there was originality enough to set all Paris on fire with excitement. I rejected the tempter energetically, telling him that the same subject had been suggested to me twice before; once by Roger de Beauvoir, author of L'Écolier de Cluny; also by Fourcade, who, at that time, was anxious to produce literature.
Henri Fourcade was Fourcade's brother, my old friend, of whom I have already spoken with reference to my early love affairs at Villers-Cotterets; who, it will be recollected, danced so well, and had in his pocket a second pair of gloves to change, when he went to the ball—a luxury at which I had been struck dumb. One night, then, when we had been laughing, talking, spouting verses, playing music, and having supper, as I was about to see my friends out and was lighting them from the top of my landing, I felt suddenly overtaken with a slight trembling in my legs; I took no notice of it and lent against the bannisters, half to light those who were going downstairs and half to support myself, as I shouted a ringing, cheerful au revoir! to them. Then, when the sound of their footsteps was lost in the square, I turned round to go into my rooms.
"Oh, monsieur!" said Catherine to me, "how pale you are!"
"Nonsense; am I really, Catherine?" I said laughingly. "Go and look in the glass, sir, and see."
I followed her advice and looked in the glass. I was, indeed, exceedingly pale. At the same time, I was seized with a shaking which gradually turned to a violent shivering fit.
"It is queer," I said; "I feel very cold."
"Ah! monsieur," cried Catherine; "that is how it begins."
"What, Catherine?"