“Why, yes,” chirruped Gaillard, a vista of pleasure in the country, champagne, pretty girls, and April skies springing up before him, painted upon the night. “I shall be charmed. The country now is like a picture—the skies by Fantin, the blossoms by Diaz. I will come in a straw hat. Tell me, Toto: shall I bring a girl?”
“Confound it, no!” said the Prince. “Célestin is not that sort.”
Gaillard sighed.
They had reached the house in the Rue de Turbigo where he lived, and passed through the entresol and up, up, up a great many stairs, for the poet lived at the top of his tree.
“Fanfoullard has not come, then,” he cried in a voice of disappointment as he opened his door and revealed a big room lit by the remains of a fire. “Light a candle, Toto, whilst I build up the fire.”
“There are no candles,” said Toto, hunting about match in hand.
“True—I forgot,” cried the poet, running into the little bedroom adjoining and returning with a night-light in a soap-dish; “I used them all to-day.”
“Why, you don’t burn candles in the daylight?”
“Indeed,” said Gaillard, “I do. When I am working I always close the shutters and work by candlelight. My ideas are like moths; daylight dispels them, candlelight attracts them. They are like gray moths, the color of decay; could you look in when I am at work, you would perhaps see them flitting about my head—reveling around their maker. Bon Dieu! this bellows is broken. Toto, hand me that bundle of wood. I have written by a night light. ‘Satanitie’ was written by a night-light, finished in the first rays of the dawn; that book was written at a single sitting in one night of sheer madness.”
“I know; you told me so the other day,” replied Toto, whilst Gaillard, his hat still on his head, and his frock-coat hanging round him like a skirt, squatted on his hams before the fire, putting pieces of stick upon it with finger and thumb, whilst the flames leaped up and, assisting the feeble flame of the night-light, illuminated the room.