PART SECOND.
Now, before that summer was gone, these two were betrothed to one another, and my little fair dead daughter, all faded and scentless though her half-opened leaves were, remained always on René’s heart as a tender and treasured relic.
They were betrothed, I say—not wedded, for they were so terribly poor.
Many a day he, I think, had not so much as a crust to eat; and there passed many weeks when the works on his canvas stood unfinished because he had not wherewithal to buy the oils and the colors to finish them.
René was frightfully poor, indeed; but then, being an artist and a poet, and the lover of a fair and noble woman, and a dreamer of dreams, and a man God-gifted, he was no longer wretched. For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves truly, and has a genius in him stronger than all calamity, and hears a voice in which he believes say always in his ear: “Fear nothing. Men must believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile we can wait!” And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the “réalité de l’idéal” around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet, studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone survives; the trance—half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire and despair—before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the doors; the glow of color in market-place and peopled square; the quaint gray piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green, silent woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain;—all these are his. With these—and youth—who shall dare say he is not rich—ay, though his board be empty and his cup be dry?
I had not loved Paris—I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay pot, and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to love it, hearing from René and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.
City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also City of the Poor? for that city, like herself, has remembered the poor in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her divine ideals.
O world! when you let Paris die you will let your last youth die with her! Your rich will mourn a paradise deserted, but your poor will have need to weep with tears of blood for the ruin of the sole Eden whose sunlight sought them in their shadow, whose music found them in their loneliness, whose glad green ways were open to their tired feet, whose radiance smiled the sorrow from their aching eyes, and in whose wildest errors and whose vainest dreams their woes and needs were unforgotten.
Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which grew into being in an attic, had a tender grace of its own; and I watched it with tenderness, and it seemed to me fresh as the dews of the morning in the midst of the hot, stifling world.