She turned her head, her breath, sweet and warm, met my face. Then I kissed her, not as a brother but as a lover.
CHAPTER XXVII REMORSE
And I did not love her at all. Nor did she love me. It was just as though the great tide of Nature had seized us, innocently floating, and flung us together, drifted us together for a little while, and then let us part; for we never referred to the matter again after that day.
But a cloud had arisen on my horizon, a cloud no larger than Eloise's hand.
I installed Franzius at Fauchard's cottage.
He brought his luggage with him, done up in a brown-paper parcel, under his right arm; under his left he carried his violin. I will never forget him that afternoon as he stepped from the train at Evry station, where Eloise and I were waiting to receive him. Such a Bohemian, bringing the very pavement of Paris with him, the music of Mirlitons, the gaslight of the Rue Coquenard, and the sawdust of La Closerie de Lilas.
Unhappy man! Paris had marked him for her own. Heaven itself could never entirely remove from his exterior the stains and the scorching, the lines around his eyes drawn during the early hours in dancing hall and café, the bruised look that poverty, hunger, and cold impress upon the servants who wait upon the Muses—the lower servants, whose place is the courtyard! But the stains and the scorching had not reached his soul; like Shadrach he had passed through the burning fiery furnace and come out a living man.
Besides his luggage and his violin he was carrying some rolls of music-paper.