"I am glad your cough is better, but do take care of yourself."
Ah, yes! we all wished he would take care of himself; but, alas! that is just the thing he could not be induced to do. One would think that to be in love with one woman, and just out of love with another, would be fairly enough to occupy one man's mind; but it was not so with Claude. He was working in his studio, in museums and libraries, all day long, and of an evening he would study anatomy, as if he bad been qualifying for a doctor. Pictures seemed constantly coming to him, like so many mocking Will-o'-the-wisps, flitting before his eyes when they were open, and twitting his worried brain when they were closed.
Madeleine's letters were always particularly quieting and soothing to him, and he used to say that, when he wanted a rest, he liked to sit down and write to her.
Not long after Claude's momentous visit to his uncle I had again to leave Paris. It was a wrench to part with him just when he needed a friend to help him through his joys and troubles, but duties of various kinds called me back to Munich, so there was nothing for it but to say good-bye. We felt it doubly, for we knew we were not to meet for some time. Write we should, to be sure, we were always good correspondents; and this time there was no need to assure one another that we should do so often.
I started from the Gare du Nord.
"Good-bye then, old fellow! Au revoir—adieu!"—lightly said, deeply felt.
I rolled on, thinking of Claude and Jeanne, the widow and Madeleine, till I got to my destination, my queer little studio in that ramshackle old house, Schützenstrause No. 5/3 links. The address is no use now, for that abode of mine is pulled down, as are its dear decrepit brothers and sisters, and the primitive old station opposite. All to make room for new buildings more suitable to tenants with sensitive noses and rectilinear tastes.
The first letter that reached me from Paris was not, as I expected, in Claude's handwriting, but in his father's. It told me that Claude was too ill to write. He was to have gone down to his uncle's on the Saturday (I had left on the Tuesday), and he was looking forward to what only a short time previously he had called a trap, a guet-apens, with the greatest impatience, for amongst other guests would be Olga Rabachot. But before the day came he caught a severe chill, and was peremptorily ordered to bed.
The fascinating widow he was never to see again. Not only the old cough had returned, but with it symptoms sufficiently grave to make it desirable he should winter abroad.
I had foreseen, and so has doubtless any one who has cared so far to follow Dupont on the love-path, that it was not he who would marry, the fascinating widow, but the uncle, and so I may as well state that such was the case. How it came about I either never knew or have forgotten, and as I should only be getting out of my depth if I attempted to fill the gap with scraps of fiction, I will confine myself to the simple narrative based on my recollections, and will merely add that I trust the uncle and the aunt lived happily ever after, and that the workmen at the dyer's works got as much ventilation as was procurable at that time and in that particular part of the world.