A week or two had thus gone by since the dreadful evening at the Opéra Comique, and all this time I had neither seen nor heard more of the fair Josephine. My acquaintance with Franz Müller and the life of the Quartier Latin had, on the contrary, progressed rapidly. Just as the affair of the Opera had dealt a final blow to my romance à la grisette on the one hand, so had the excursion to Courbevoie, the visit to the École de Natation, and the adventure of the Café Procope, fostered my intimacy with the artist on the other. We were both young, somewhat short of money, and brimful of fun. Each, too, had a certain substratum of earnestness underlying the mere surface-gayety of his character. Müller was enthusiastic for art; I for poetry; and both for liberty. I fear, when I look back upon them, that we talked a deal of nonsense about Brutus, and the Rights of Man, and the noble savage, and all that sort of thing, in those hot-headed days of our youth. It was a form of political measles that the young men of that time were quite as liable to as the young men of our own; and, living as we then were in the heart of the most revolutionary city in Europe, I do not well see how we could have escaped the infection. Müller (who took it worse than I did, and was very rabid indeed when I first knew him) belonged just then not only to the honorable brotherhood of Les Chicards, but also to a small debating club that met twice a week in a private room at the back of an obscure Estaminet in the Rue de la Harpe. The members of this club were mostly art-students, and some, like himself, Chicards--generous, turbulent, high-spirited boys, with more enthusiasm than brains, and a flow of words wholly out of proportion to the bulk of their ideas. As I came to know him more intimately, I used sometimes to go there with Müller, after our cheap dinner in the Quartier and our evening stroll along the Boulevards or the Champs Elysées; and I am bound to admit that I never, before or since, heard quite so much nonsense of the declamatory sort as on those memorable occasions. I did not think it nonsense then, however. I admired it with all my heart; applauded the nursery eloquence of these sucking Mirabeaus and Camille Desmoulins as frantically as their own vanity could desire; and was even secretly chagrined that my own French was not yet fluent enough to enable me to take part in their discussions.
In the meanwhile, my debts were paid; and, having dropped out of society when I fell out of love with Madame de Marignan, I no longer overspent my allowance. I bought no more bouquets, paid for no more opera-stalls, and hired no more prancing steeds at seven francs the hour. I bade adieu to picture-galleries, flower-shows, morning concerts, dress boots, white kid gloves, elaborate shirt-fronts, and all the vanities of the fashionable world. In a word, I renounced the Faubourg St. Germain for the Quartier Latin, and applied myself to such work and such pleasures as pertained to the locality. If, after a long day at Dr. Chéron's, or the Hôtel Dieu, or the École de Médecine, I did waste a few hours now and then, I, at least, wasted them cheaply. Cheaply, but oh, so pleasantly! Ah me! those nights at the debating club, those evenings at the Chicards, those student's balls at the Chaumière, those third-class trips to Versailles and Fontainebleau, those one-franc pit seats at the Gaîeté and the Palais Royal, those little suppers at Pompon's and Flicoteau's--how delightful they were! How joyous! How free from care! And even when we made up a party and treated the ladies (for to treat the ladies is de rigueur in the code of Quartier Latin etiquette), how little it still cost, and what a world of merriment we had for the money!
It was well for me, too, and a source of much inward satisfaction, that my love-affair with Mademoiselle Josephine had faded and died a natural death. We never made up that quarrel of the Opéra Comique, and I had not desired that we should make it up. On the contrary, I was exceedingly glad of the opportunity of withdrawing my attentions; so I wrote her a polite little note, in which I expressed my regret that our tastes were so dissimilar and our paths in life so far apart; wished her every happiness; assured her that I should ever remember her with friendly regard; and signed my name with a tremendous flourish at the bottom of the second page. With the note, however, I sent her a raised pie and a red and green shawl, of which I begged her acceptance in token of amity; and as neither of those gifts was returned, I concluded that she ate the one and wore the other, and that there was peace between us.
But the scales of fortune as they go up for one, go down for another. This man's luck is balanced by that man's ruin--Orestes falls sick, and Pylades returns from Kissingen cured of his lumbago--old Croesus dies, and little Miss Kilmansegg comes into the world with a golden spoon in her mouth, So it fell out with Franz Müller and myself. As I happily steered clear of Charybdis, he drifted into Scylla--in other words, just as I recovered from my second attack of the tender passion, he caught the epidemic and fancied himself in love with the fair Marie.
I say "fancied," because his way of falling in love was so unlike my way, that I could scarcely believe it to be the same complaint. It affected neither his appetite, nor his spirits, nor his wardrobe. He made as many puns and smoked as many pipes as usual. He did not even buy a new hat. If, in fact, he had not told me himself, I should never have guessed that anything whatever was the matter with him.
It came out one day when he was pressing me to go with him to a certain tea-party at Madame Marotte's, in the Rue St. Denis.
"You see," said he, "it is la petite Marie's fête; and the party's in her honor; and they'd be so proud if we both went to it; and--and, upon my soul, I'm awfully fond of that little girl"....
"Of Marie Marotte?"
He nodded.
"You are not serious," I said.