“The truth—the truth!” said my father passionately. “Is it the truth? and if it is, could it not have been told in a less brutal fashion? You have acted like a fiend!—not like a man! If Silvion Guidèl be a vile seducer, and that poor child Pauline his credulous, ruined victim, could you not have dealt with him and have spared her? God! I would as soon wring the neck of a bird that trusted me, as add any extra weight to the sorrows of an already broken-hearted woman!”
More than this, the indignant old man gives his son a substantial sum of money, and turns him out of his house.
Pauline, too, leaves her home in a mysterious and sudden fashion, without telling any one where she is going. The death of her father, M. de Charmilles, quickly follows. Beauvais drinks himself stupid every night, and spends his days doggedly hunting for Pauline, who, he feels sure, has hidden herself in the loathsome slums in which Paris abounds. And in time he does meet her, but long before this he encounters her seducer, Silvion Guidèl, and, after a mad struggle, throttles him, and casts the corpse into the Seine.
The murder is not traced home to Beauvais, who drinks more deeply than ever of the deadly absinthe, and becomes more surely its slave with every draught. Gessonex, the disreputable artist who introduced him to this form of vice, ends his failure of a career by shooting himself on the pavement outside of a café after one of these carousals, and it is while Beauvais is visiting the artist’s grave that he at last sets eyes on Pauline, kneeling by the tomb of the De Charmilles. For he cannot mistake the figure crouching by that closed door: “She was slight, and clad in poorest garments—the evening wind blew her thin shawl about her like a gossamer sail,—but the glimmer of the late sunlight glistened on a tress of nut-brown hair that had escaped from its coils and fell loosely over her shoulders,—and my heart beat thickly as I looked,—I knew—I felt that woman was Pauline!”
When he endeavors to track her to her lodgings, however, she unconsciously eludes him, and he obtains no clue as to where she may be found.
Weeks go by, and Beauvais swallows more and more absinthe by way of deadening thought and feeling. The insidious poison is beginning to tell on his brain. At times he is seized by the notion that everything about him is of absurdly abnormal proportions, or the reverse. “Men and women would, as I looked at them, suddenly assume the appearance of monsters both in height and breadth, and again, would reduce themselves in the twinkling of an eye to the merest pigmies.” So, while the absintheur’s brain and body decline, the summer fades into autumn, and he is still looking for Pauline. At length, one dismal November evening, whilst wandering home in his usual heavily drugged condition, he hears a woman singing in one of the by-streets. She is singing a well-known convent chant, the “Guardian Angel”:
“Viens sur ton aile, Ange fidèle
Prendre mon cœur!
C’est le plus ardent de mes vœux;—
Près de Marie
Place-moi bientôt dans les cieux!
O guide aimable, sois favorable
A mon désir
Et viens finir
Ma triste vie
Avec Marie!"
It is Pauline at last! Then the absinthe tells its tale, and Beauvais completes his scheme of vengeance. With cold-blooded ferocity he confesses that he has slain her lover, whereupon the desolate girl, the hopes she had fostered of meeting Silvion again being forever shattered, buries her woes in the dark bosom of the river of sighs.
Beauvais haunts the Morgue for two days, and his patience is rewarded. Here is a piece of description which, in its way, is perfect:
“An afternoon came when I saw the stretcher carried in from the river’s bank with more than usual pity and reverence,—and I, pressing in with the rest of the morbid spectators, saw the fair, soft, white body of the woman I had loved and hated and maddened and driven to her death, laid out on the dull hard slab of stone like a beautiful figure of frozen snow. The river had used her tenderly—poor little Pauline!—it had caressed her gently and had not disfigured her delicate limbs or spoilt her pretty face;—she looked so wise, so sweet and calm, that I fancied the cold and muddy Seine must have warmed and brightened to the touch of her drowned beauty!