How many days had he spent in this fashion? Scarcely seven, but in his present sufferings they appeared to him an eternity. Looking at the almanac on the morning of the eighth day, he saw that May was drawing to an end. Although the pilgrimage he contemplated inspired him with horror, the bourgeois habits of regularity that had animated him throughout his life induced him to turn his steps once more towards the Rue des Dames. There was the landlady's bill to be paid and notice of leaving to be given her. He chose the afternoon for his visit, so as to be sure of not meeting Suzanne. 'Just as if she had not already forgotten me,' he said to himself. What were his feelings on finding not only her handkerchief and gloves, but next to them a note she had left there on a second visit addressed to 'M. d'Albert!' He tore it open, but his hands shook so terribly that it took him quite five minutes to read the few sentences it contained, many of the words, too, being half effaced by tears.
'I came back once more, my love! From the shrine of our passion, and in the name of the memories it must contain for you as well as for me, I entreat you to see me once again. Darling—will you not think of me here without those horrible flashes of hatred I have seen in your eyes? Remember what proofs of affection I have given you on the spot where you are reading these lines. No! I cannot live if you doubt what is the one, the only great truth of my life. I repeat once more that I am not angry nor indignant—I am in despair; if you do not believe me it is because, with my heart full of love and pain, I cannot stoop to artifice to make you believe anything. Good-bye, my love! How often have I repeated these words on the threshold of this room! And then I would add—Au revoir! But I suppose it must really be good-bye now, both on my lips and in my heart—can it be good-bye for ever?'
'Good-bye, my love!' repeated René, trying in vain to steel his heart. The simple, loving words, the sight of the room, the thought that Suzanne had come here without the hope of seeing him, and merely as a pilgrim to the shrine of their past love—all contributed to work him up to a pitch of frenzy, which he did his best to withstand. 'Her love!' he cried, with a sudden outburst of fury, 'and she went to another—for money! What a coward I am!' To escape the painful feelings he could not banish he left the room hurriedly and rang Madame Raulet's bell. The fair-spoken and accommodating landlady soon made her appearance, and led the way into her own little parlour, furnished with the remaining articles she could not get into the other. On his telling her that he was giving up the apartments her face showed signs of real annoyance.
'The bill is not quite ready,' she said.
'I am in no hurry,' replied René, and, fearing a fresh attack of despair if he returned to the room he had left, he added, 'I'll wait here, if you don't mind.'
Although he was in no observant mood, he could not help noticing that in the twenty minutes she kept him waiting Madame Raulet had found time to change her dress. Instead of the striped cotton wrapper in which she had received him, she now wore a becoming evening dress of black grenadine. The corsage consisted of bands of stuff alternating with lace insertions, through which might be seen the fair neck and shoulders of the coquettish widow. There was a brighter look in her eyes and a more vivid colour in her cheeks than usual, and, laying the bill on the table, she said:
'Excuse me for having kept you waiting. I didn't feel very well. I have such palpitations of the heart—feel!' Taking René's hand with a smile that would not have deceived the simplest soul living, she placed it on the spot where her heart should have been.
She had suspected the rupture between the pseudo-d'Albert and his mistress by the two solitary visits of Madame Moraines. The fact of René giving up the apartments proved her suspicions to be correct, and an idea of taking advantage of the rupture had suddenly entered her head, either because the poet with his manly beauty really pleased her or because she had an eye to pecuniary considerations she could not afford to despise. She was by no means old and thought herself very attractive. But on looking at her lodger as she carried his hand to her side she saw in his eyes a look of such cool contempt and disgust that she immediately loosed her hold of his fingers. She took up the bill, the writing in which showed that it had been prudently made out beforehand, and tried to cover her confusion by entering into profuse explanations of this or that item in a highly inflated account which the poet did not even stoop to verify. He handed her the sum he owed her, half in paper, half in gold. The humiliating defeat of her amorous attempt had not deprived her wits of their sharpness, for she examined the notes by holding each one up to the light, and looked closely at each of the gold pieces as she counted them. She even sounded one of the coins that seemed a little light in weight, and, after a moment's hesitation, said: 'I must ask you to let me have another for this.'
The impressions produced by this shamelessness and sordid greed were so well in keeping with the rest of René's feelings that during the quarter of an hour it took him to carry the few things he had in the three rooms to his cab he—to use the apt and expressive words of a humourist—'was as merry as a mute going to his own funeral.' As the old 'growler' jolted along over the stones, carrying in its musty-smelling interior the emblems of his happiness, his cruel merriment changed to a fit of most abject melancholy. He recognised every inch of the way he had so often trodden in the ecstasy of love, and which he would never tread again. Dark and lowering clouds hung over the city. Since the preceding evening there had been one of those unexpected returns of winter to which Paris is frequently exposed about the middle of spring, and which nip the young verdure with frost. As the cab crossed the Seine, flowing darkly and drearily along, the unhappy man looked down into the water and thought, 'How easy it would be to end it all!'
After this movement of despair he felt in his pocket for Suzanne's letter, as if to convince himself of the reality of his grief. He also took out her handkerchief and inhaled its perfume—for some time; then he gazed at her gloves, and saw in them the shape of the fingers he had loved so well. He felt that he had exhausted all his energy in resisting temptation, and as soon as he was alone in his room after this fresh and painful crisis he cried aloud, 'I cannot bear it any longer!'