Bohemian Days: Three American Tales

by George Alfred Townsend

This is the great ball of the Latin Quarter. It stands near the barriers upon the Boulevard, and is haunted with students and grisettes. Commonly it was thronged with waltzers, and the scene on gala nights, when all the lamps were aflame, and the music drowned out by the thunder of the dance, was a compromise between Paradise and Pandemonium. Tonight there was a beggarly array of folk; the multitude of garçons contemplated each other's white aprons, and old Bullier, the proprietor, staggering under his huge hat, exhibited a desire to be taken out and interred. The wild-eyed young man with flying, carroty locks, who stood in the set directly under the orchestra, at that part of the floor called "the kitchen," was flinging up his legs without any perceptible enjoyment, and the policemen in helmets, and cuirassiers, who had hard work to keep order in general, looked like lay figures now, and strolled off into the embowered and sloppy gardens. There were not two hundred folk under the roofs. Ralph had come here with the unacknowledged thought of meeting Suzette, and he walked around with his cigar, leaning upon Terrapin's arm and making himself disagreeable.

Suddenly he came before her. She seemed to have arisen from the earth. She looked so weak and haggard that he was impelled to speak to her; but he was obdurate and hard-hearted. He could have filled her cup of bitterness and watched her drink it to the dregs, and would have been relentless if she was kneeling at his feet.

"Flare, what makes you tremble so?" said Terrapin; "are you cold? Confound it, man, you are sick! Sit here in the draft and take some cognac."

"No," answered Ralph, "I am all right again. You see my girl there? (Don't look at her!) You know some of these girls, old fellow? I mean to treat two of them to a bottle of champagne. She will see it. I mean for her to do so. Who are these passing? Come with me."

He walked by Suzette and her friend as if they had been invisible, and addressed those whom he pursued with such energy that they shrank back. He made one of them take his arm, and hurried here and there, saying honeyed words all the time, by which she was affrighted; but every smile, false as it was, fell into Suzette's heart.

Weary, wan, wretched, she kept them ever in view, crossing his path now and then, in the vain thought that she might have one word from him, though it were a curse. He took his new friends into an alcove. She saw the wine burst from the bottle, and heard the clink of the glasses as they drank good health. She did not know that all his laughter was feigned, that his happiness was delirium, that his vows were lies. She did not believe Ralph Flare so base as to put his foot upon her, whom he had already stricken down.

And he—he was all self, all stone!—he laid no offence at his own door. He did not ask if her infidelity was real or if it had no warrant in his own slight and goading. The poor, pale face went after him reproachfully. Every painful footfall that she made was the patter of a blood-drop. Such unnatural excitement must have some termination. He quarrelled with a waiter. Old Bullier ordered a cuirassier to take him to the door; he would have resisted, but Terrapin whispered: "Don't be foolish, Flare; if you are put out it will be a triumph for the girl;" and only this conviction kept him calm. The cyprians whom he wooed followed him out; he turned upon them bitterly when he had crossed the threshold, and leaping into a carriage was driven to his hotel, where he slept unquietly till daybreak.

See him, at dawn, in deep slumber! his face is sallow, his lips are dry, his chest heaves nervously as he breathes hard. It is a bad sleep; it is the sleep of bad children, to whom the fiend comes, knowing that the older they grow the more surely are they his own.

This is not, surely, the bashful young man who started at the phantom of his mother, and sinned reluctantly. Aye! but those who do wrong after much admonishment are wickeder than those who obey the first bad impulse. He is ten times more cast away who thinks and sins than he who only sins and does not think.

Ralph Flare was one of your reasoning villains. His conscience was not a better nature rising up in the man, and saying "this is wrong." It was not conscience at all; it was only a fear. Far down as Suzette might be, she never could have been unfeeling, unmerciful as he. It is a bad character to set in black and white, yet you might ask old Terrapin or any shrewd observer what manner of man was Ralph, and they would say, "So-so-ish, a little sentimental, spooney likewise; but a good fellow, a good fellow!" And more curious than all, Suzette said so too.