Vagabond Adventures

by Ralph Keeler

But, seriously, I owe Mr. Townsend a real debt of gratitude, for it was he who suggested that I should write an account of certain of my experiences for one of the London magazines. After the questionable success of my multifarious attempts with American newspapers, I trembled at the temerity of the idea. Yet my money was becoming daily and by no means beautifully less. Neither Mr. Townsend nor anybody else but myself was aware that, at the time of his suggestion, my cash capital consisted of one gold napoleon, a silver five-franc piece, and some three or four sous; and even this sum had dwindled considerably before I could muster courage to make the attempt.

At last, in a fit of desperation, I sat down one morning, with the equivalent of about two dollars in my pocket, and commenced my article. In three days more it was on its way to London with an enclosure of British stamps, enough to pay for the letter which should tell me whether it was accepted or rejected.

I shall not dwell longer than I can help upon the painful suspense of the succeeding five or six days; though I do not remember now my grounds for expecting an answer in so short a period.

Up to that time I will venture to say there was not a happier person in the gay capital of France than I had been; for it is one of the peculiar charms of Paris that it affords abundant amusement for him who spends forty francs a month, as I did, or forty thousand a month, as some do.

I cannot explain now, any more than you can believe in, my happiness then. I know only that the beautiful city was delightful, and that I was delighted. The palaces, the galleries, the gardens, the parks, the music, and the wonderful diorama of the evening Boulevards were free,—as free to me, the vagabond stranger, as they were to the greatest prince; and I had the additional, though not necessarily comfortable, assurance that I always carried away from them a better appetite for the next meal than did even his inscrutable majesty, the Emperor himself.

But now that I had the growing cares of authorship on my mind, it dwelt more and more upon the waning disks of my franc-pieces, as they swelled for a time illusively into sous, and then tapered into centimes and disappeared from my gaze forever.

At this period I found myself occasionally strolling down to the Seine, and looking over from Pont Neuf at the flood below, swollen with the late rains, and listening to the strange sound it made in the wake of the old stone arches, as it rushed on toward the Morgue,—the famous dead-house, where hundreds of suicides are displayed every year.

Have you ever heard the last “bubbling groan” of a drowning man? If you have, you will understand the feeling with which, after listening long and steadily to the low rumble of the eddying water, I have received the impression more than once on that old bridge, that I heard the same fatal gurgling sound in the river beneath; and you will understand the feeling, also, I think, with which, at such times, I cast a hasty glance at the Morgue, not far distant, and hurried on to the more cheerful neighborhood of the garden of the Tuileries.

I would not have you believe that the idea of suicide ever crossed my mind. I merely went and looked into the Seine, on that queer, unexplained principle which impels miserable people, the world over, to haunt wharves and bridges, and to gaze listlessly into water. I have sometimes thought, when I saw servant-girls and others out of employ looking, for instance, from the bridge of boats at Manheim into the Rhine, as into the window of an intelligence-office,—I have sometimes thought, I say, that if dogs do go mad from gazing into water, as I think was once believed, they are very miserable dogs, and very much disgusted with the world, before they do it.

One day,—the fourth of my suspense, if I remember,—when I was more despondent and hungry than usual, I went and looked in through the grating of the Morgue itself. If I had ever had the least thought of throwing myself into the Seine, this horrible sight would have cured me as thoroughly of it as it did of my appetite for the rest of that day.