He walked to the little washstand with an embarrassed air, and set to preparing our morning cup of chocolate from the mill that stood thereon.
“After all,” he said, when the fragrant froth sputtered about his nostrils, “the proper period to any exquisite sensation is death. I dread no termination but that put to an hour of abstinence. To die with the wine in one’s throat and the dagger in one’s back—what could kings wish for better?”
He handed me my cup, and sipped enjoyingly at his own.
“I am representative of a constituency,” he said, “yet a better judge of wine than of men. The palate and the heart are associated in a common bond. That I would decree the basis of the new religion. ‘Tears of Christ’!—it is a vintage I would make Tallien and Manuel and Billaud de Varennes drunk on every day.”
He laughed in an agitated manner, and glanced at me over the rim of his cup.
“Go your way, Jean-Louis,” he repeated; “and pardon me if I call it the right mule one. But you will walk it, for I know you. And eat your fill of the sweet thistle-flowers before the thorns shall stab your gullet and take all relish from the feast.”
“Casimir!” I cried in some black wonder—“this is all the language of a villain or an hysteric——!”
I paused, stared at his twitching face, took up my hat quietly, and left the room.
* * * * * * *
A little frost on a foot, or a little blood. What is the significance of either. Once the bimbelotiers of the Palais Royal used to manufacture cards of Noël, very pretty and sparkling with rime. That was before the apotheosis of the “Third [or butterfly] State”; and many a time, during the winter of ’84, I have seen poor vagrants of the chosen brood, unwitting yet of the scarlet wings developing underneath their rugged hides, ponder over the fanciful emblems in the shop windows, and then look down with wonder at their own cracked and bleeding toes. To whom, then, could the frost appeal in this dainty guise? Not surely to those who must walk with bare feet? It is all the point of view, said the philosophers. But, they added, blood is warm, and it is well to wear socks of it if you can get no other. Put these on and look again, and you will see differently.