“Do you hesitate?” said the merciless old man. “Pshaw! whom do you hurt? You give me work as good as that which you imitate, and I call it only by a dead man’s name: who is injured? What harm can there be in humoring the fanaticism of fashion? Choose—I am in haste.”
René hid his face with his hands, so that he should not behold those dear creations of his genius which so cruelly, so innocently, assailed him with a temptation beyond his strength.
“Choose for me—you!” he muttered in his agony to Lili.
Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.
“My René, your heart has chosen,” she murmured through her dry, quivering lips. “You cannot buy honor by fraud.”
René lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes of the man who held the scales of his fate, and could weigh out for his whole life’s portion either fame and fortune, or obscurity and famine.
“Sir,” he said slowly, with a bitter, tranquil smile about his mouth, “my garret is empty, but it is clean. May I trouble you to leave it as you found it?”
So they were strong to the end, these two famished children of frivolous Paris.
But when the door had closed and shut their tempter out, the revulsion came: they wept those tears of blood which come from the hearts’ depths of those who have seen Hope mock them with a smile a moment, to leave them face to face with Death.
“Poor fools!” sighed the old vine from his corner in the gray, dull twilight of the late autumn day.