"Why?" she answered.
History writes that this ingenuous remark so unmanned him that his eyes filled with tears, and he dashed from the room, closing the door after him in order that her appealing eyes might not cause him to deflect from his purpose.
Poor Bibi—your rose path has come to an end, your day is nearly done. Back to Paris, back to the squalor and dirt of your early life. Bibi, now in her forty-seventh year, with the memories of her recent splendours still in her heart, decided to return to the stage, to the public who had loved and fêted her. Alas! she had returned too late. Something was missing—the audience laughed every time she came on, and applauded her only when she went off. Oh, Bibi, Bibi Cœur d'Or, even now in this cold age our hearts ache for you. Volauvent writes in the Journal of the period: "Bibi can dance no longer." Veaux caps it by saying "She never could," while S. Kayrille, well known for his wit and kindly humour, reviewed her in the Berlin Gazette of the period by remarking, in his customarily brilliant manner, "She is very plain and no longer in her first youth." This subtle criticism of her dancing, though convulsing the Teutonic capital, was in reality the cause of her leaving the stage and retiring with her one maid to a small house in Montmartre, where history has it she petered out the last years of her eventful career.
Absinthe was her one consolation, together with a miniature of Louis in full regalia. Who is this haggard wretch with still the vestiges of her wondrous beauty discernible in her perfectly moulded features?—not La Belle Bibi! Oh, Fate—Destiny—how cruel are you who guided her straying feet through the mazes of life! Why could she not have died at her zenith—when her portrait was painted?
But still her gay humour was with her to the end. As she lay on her crazy bed, surrounded by priests, she made the supreme and crowning bon mot of her brilliant life. Stretching out her wasted arm to the nearly empty absinthe bottle by her bed, she made a slightly resentful moue and murmured "Encore une!"
Oh, brave, witty Bibi!
AH! AH! QUEEN OF THE RUDE ISLANDS
AH! AH! Queen of the Rude Islands
THE "Rude" Islands! what a thrill that name awakes in the heart of every wanderer—lying as they do in the very heart of the rolling Pacific. Was it two or three hundred years ago that brave Joshua Mortlake discovered and christened them? History has it that he was standing on the poop deck of his schooner the "Whoops-a-Daisy" when he first beheld those pocket Paradises of the Pacific. He shaded his eyes with his hand and turned to his bosom friend—Eagle Trott: