Francine has been condemned by her doctor, and hears with her eyes the terrible sentence of the physician.
“Don’t listen to him,” says she to her love, “don’t listen to him, Jacques, he is telling stories; we will go out to-morrow, it is All Hallows Day, it will be cold, . . . go and buy me a Muff, . . . mind it is a good one, . . . and will last a long while; I am afraid of having chilblains this winter.”
Then, when Jacques has brought the Muff: “It is very pretty,” said Francine; “I will carry it in our walk.”
The morrow, All Hallows Day, about the time of the Angelus of noon, she was seized with the death-struggle, and all her body began to tremble. “My hands are cold, cold,” she murmured, “give me my Muff, dear”—and she plunged her poor little fingers into the fur.
“It is over,” said the doctor to Jacques, “give her a last kiss;” and Jacques glued his lips to those of his darling. At the last moment, they wished to take away her Muff, but her hands still clung to it.
“No, no,” she cried, “let it be—we are in winter, it is cold. Ah my poor Jacques!”
And so Francine dies, without quitting her Muff. A poignant and lugubrious story, like the work of Murger in general; the Muff of Francine will perhaps be the most durable chapter in the Vie de Bohème. We have not been able to set this realistic scene upon the stage, but a painter, M. Haquette, has displayed it after an admirable manner in one of his best pictures exhibited in one of the Paris annual Salons.
Truly the Muff calls up many sad thoughts for sentimental and charitable souls; this winter chattel reminds them of the sorrows of those who are without fire and home and comfortable clothing, and when the north wind blows without, and the snow falls softly in sombre silence, more than one dreaming girl, with her elbow leaning on the window-sill, lets her Muff fall while thinking of those unfortunates who suffer, of the careless grasshoppers and the laborious ants, of whom an adverse fortune has deceived the foresight.