I did not care much for the stone-crop or the sparrows; but in the third summer of my captivity there with Lili the garret casement opposite stood always open, as ours did, and I could watch its tenant night and day as I chose.
He had an interest for me.
He was handsome, and about thirty years old; with a sad and noble face, and dark eyes full of dreams, and cheeks terribly hollow, and clothes terribly threadbare.
He thought no eyes were on him when my lattice looked dark, for his garret, like ours, was so high that no glance from the street ever went to it. Indeed, when does a crowd ever pause to look at a garret, unless by chance a man have hanged himself out of its window? That in thousands of garrets men may be dying by inches for lack of bread, lack of hope, lack of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes upward to them from the pavement.
He thought himself unseen, and I watched him many a long hour of the summer night when I sighed at my square open pane in the hot, sulphurous mists of the street, and tried to see the stars and could not. For, between me and the one small breadth of sky which alone the innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner had hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as a sign on his roof-tree; and the crown, with its sham gold turning black in the shadow, hung between me and the planets.
I knew that there must be many human souls in a like plight with myself, with the light of heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny; and yet I sighed and sighed and sighed, thinking of the white, pure stars of Provence throbbing in her violet skies.
A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see; neither rose nor poet will be comforted, and be content to dwell in darkness because a crown of tinsel swings on high.
Well, not seeing the stars as I strove to do, I took refuge in sorrow for my neighbor. It is well for your poet when he turns to a like resource. Too often I hear he takes, instead, to the wine-cellar which yawns under the crown that he curses.
My neighbor, I soon saw, was poorer even than we were. He was a painter, and he painted beautiful things. But his canvases and the necessaries of his art were nearly all that his empty attic had in it; and when, after working many hours with a wretched glimmer of oil, he would come to his lattice and lean out, and try, as I had tried, to see the stars, and fail, as I had failed, I saw that he was haggard, pallid, and weary unto death with two dire diseases,—hunger and ambition.