“I know,” said Struve. “I have an enemy—he’s a Legitimist; I’ll send him a drunken Marquis for a present.” And he gave the name and address of his enemy to the driver, with half a napoleon to pay the fare. “Get him into the house at any price,” commanded Struve; “he’s the father of the gentleman who lives there. There goes the old nobility.”
He finished as the cab drove away, leaving a thin stream of curses on the morning air. And little did Toto dream where those curses would come to roost.
“What a jolly night we have had!” said Gaillard, as they parted at the corner of the Rue de la Paix.
“And we have all done something,” said Pelisson. “You have written a poem,—don’t have that shirt washed, they’ll sell it in strips after you are dead,—and I have written my article, and Struve has made a present to his enemy of De Nani, who has made a beast of himself.”
“And I,” said Toto, “have made a fool of myself.”
“That’s what you were born for,” said Pelisson. “But never mind, Toto, you make a most charming fool.”
Then Toto found himself alone at the corner of the Rue de la Paix.
Some she-asses were passing, and he stopped the auvergnat driving them, and had a glass of milk, because that was chic, and when he had drunk the milk he wished he had not, because there was no one to look; and, besides, he was tired of being chic. Then, with the asses’ milk still upon his lips, he came along down the Rue de la Paix in the direction of the river.
The change of his five-franc piece the auvergnat had given him mostly in copper; it bulged out his trousers-pocket, and made a clanking sound as he walked. Paris was waking up, the lidlike shutters of the shops were rising through a thousand streets; and as he passed through the Place Vendôme several early morning cabs laden with luggage from the Nord Station tore by.
In the Rue Castiglione he stopped. What should he do? It was too early to go home, too late for the club; the world he knew had gone to bed, the world he dimly knew of was waking up. A world in its shirt-sleeves, clean, bright, busy, and apparently happy. The dinner, the supper, the Marquis de Nani, Pelisson’s roaring voice, Struve’s lisp, and Gaillard’s melancholic poetry, all pursued him like Eumenides of a low sort, impotent, yet able to tease.