"But when May had come, she was no better. And travelling was expensive, and all places were alike to her since she was forbidden to return to Paris. She, had disposed of more jewellery, and looked forward to the autumn. And in the autumn she had looked forward to the spring. So it had gone on.
"At first, while letters came to her sometimes, telling her how she was missed, the banishment had been alleviated; later, in her loneliness, it had grown frightful. Monsieur, her soul—that little soul that pleasure had held dumb—cried out, under misfortune, like a homeless child for its mother. Her longing took her by the throat, and the doctor had difficulty in dissuading her from going to meet death by the first train. She did not suspect that she was doomed in any case; he thought it kinder to deceive her. He had preached 'Patience, mademoiselle, a little patience!' And she had wrung her hands, but yielded—sustained by the hope of a future that she was never to know.
"By this time the last of her jewels was sold, and most of the money had been spent. The fact alarmed her when she dwelt upon it, but she did not dwell upon it very often—in the career of Little-Flower-of- the-Wood, so many financial crises had been righted at the last moment. No, although there was nobody now to whom she could turn for help, it was not anxiety that bowed her; the thoughts by which she was stricken, as she sauntered feebly on the eternal promenade, were that in Paris they no longer talked of her, and that her prettiness had passed away. She was forgotten, ugly! The tragedy of her exile was that.
"Now it was that she found out the truth—she learnt that there was no chance of her recovering. She made no reproaches for the lies that had been told her; she recognized that they had been well meant. All she said was, 'I am glad that it is not too late; I may see Paris still before the curtain tumbles—I shall go at once.'
"Not many months of life remained to her, but they were more numerous than her louis. It was an unfamiliar Paris that she returned to! She had quitted the Paris of the frivolous and fêted; she came back to the Paris of the outcast poor. The world that she had remembered gave her no welcome—she peered through its shut windows, friendless in the streets.
"Gentlemen, last night all the customers had gone from the little Café du Bon Vieux Temps but a woman in a shabby opera-cloak—a woman with tragic eyes, and half a lung. She sat fingering her glass of beer absently, though the clock over the desk pointed to a quarter to midnight, and at midnight beer-drinkers are no longer desired in the Bon Vieux Temps. But she was a stranger; it was concluded that she didn't know.
"Adolphe approached to enlighten her; 'Madame wishes to order supper?' he asked.
"The stranger shook her head.
"'Madame will have champagne?'
"'Don't bother me!' said the woman.