She looks doubtful. “Not very nice; but we will do for the best. I will be so careful.”
“Oh, we’ll arrange somehow. We’ll then have five hundred francs for food and other things. We must make that last for three months. By that time I’m sure to be making something out of my writings. Five hundred francs for two people for three months isn’t much, is it?”
“No, but we will take very much care, darleen. I do not care for myself; it is only for you.”
“Don’t lose any sleep over me. I’ll be all right if you will. It will be real fun scheming and dreaming, and making the best of everything. We’ll see how much happiness we can squeeze out of every little sou; we’ll get to know the joys and sorrows of the poor. They say that Bohemia is vanished; but we’ll prove that wherever there is striving and the happy heart in spite of need, wherever there is devotion to art in the face of poverty, there eternally is Bohemia. Hurrah! how splendid to be young and poor and to have our dreams!”
I laugh exultantly, and the girl enters into my joyous mood.
“Yes,” she says, “we shall be gay. As for me, I will buy a métier. I will work at my hem-broderie. I will make leetle money like that. Oh, not much, but it will assist. So we will be all right.”
“Yes,” I cry, enamoured of the vision. “And when success does come, how we will glory in it! How good will seem the feast after the fast! Ah! but sometimes, when we have our house near the Bois, will we not look back with regret to the days when we struggled and rejoiced there in our tiny Mansard of Dreams?”
I pause for a moment, while my kinematographic imagination begins to work. I go on dramatically:
“Then some day of December twilight, when the snow is falling, I will steal away from the flunkies and the marble halls, and go down to look at the old windows now so blind and dead. And as I stand wrapped in mournful reverie and a five hundred franc overcoat, suddenly I hear a soft step. There in the dusk I am aware of a shadowy form also gazing up at the poor old windows. Lo! it is you, and there are tears in your eyes. You too have slipped away from the marble halls to sentimentalise over the old home. Then we embrace, and, calling the limousine, whirl off to dinner at the Café de la Paix.... But that reminds me—let’s go to déjeûner. Where shall it be—chez Voisin, Foyet, or Laperouse?”
It turns out to be at the sign of the Golden Snail in the neighbourhood of the Markets, where for one franc seventy-five we have an elaborate choice of hors-de-œuvres, some meat that we strongly suspect to be horse, big white beans, a bludgeon of highly-glazed bread, a wedge of mould-sheathed Camembert (which she eats with joy, but which I cannot be induced to touch), and some purple wine that puts my teeth on edge. Yet, as I sit there with a large damp napkin on my knee and my feet in the saw-dust of the floor, I am superlatively happy.