“Yes!—the river had fondled her!—had stroked her cheeks and left them pale and pure,—had kissed her lips and closed them in a childlike, happy smile,—had swept all her soft hair back from the smooth white brow just to show how prettily the blue veins were penciled under the soft transparent skin,—had closed the gentle eyes and deftly pointed the long dark lashes in a downward sleepy fringe,—and had made of one little dead girl so wondrous and piteous a picture, that otherwise hard-hearted women sobbed at sight of it, and strong men turned away with hushed footsteps and moistened eyes.”
And that, practically, is the end of the story, for Gaston Beauvais, having revenged himself on his sweetheart and her betrayer, has nought to do now save drink absinthe. Delirium tremens ensues, Beauvais is laid up for a month, and at the end of that period the doctor speaks plain words of wisdom and warning to him:
“You must give it up,” he said decisively, “at once,—and forever. It is a detestable habit,—a horrible craze of the Parisians, who are positively deteriorating in blood and brain by reason of their passion for this poison. What the next generation will be, I dread to think! I know it is a difficult business to break off anything to which the system has grown accustomed,—but you are still a young man, and you cannot be too strongly warned against the danger of continuing in your present course of life. Moral force is necessary,—and you must exert it. I have a large medical practice, and cases like yours are alarmingly common, and as much on the increase as morphinomania amongst women; but I tell you frankly, no medicine can do good where the patient refuses to employ his own power of resistance. I must ask you, therefore, for your own sake, to bring all your will to bear on the effort to overcome this fatal habit of yours, as a matter of duty and conscience.”
But the physician’s admonition falls on heedless ears. Beauvais returns to the alluring glass, and the book ends with the confession that he is a confirmed absintheur—“a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou!—a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the daytime, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm!”
Such is the graphic and terrible picture drawn by Marie Corelli of the effects of this iniquitous draught. If Beauvais had not been tempted by Gessonex to taste it, it is not probable that Pauline’s piteous confession would have resulted in such wholesale tragedy; for Heloïse St. Cyr, the sweet woman-friend of the bride-elect’s, dies, too, and so an entire happy household is destroyed by reason of one man’s uncontrollable savagery.
Had Beauvais never put his lips to the fatal glass, he would in all probability, on hearing what had befallen his sweetheart, have quietly broken off the match. For, it must be remembered, he was a respectable young banker, of sober mien and quiet ways, not a Bohemian and frequenter of all-night cafés. But he tasted absinthe, and so brought about his undoing, as many another young Parisian is bringing it about at the present day. Here is the novelist’s fierce denunciation of the vice:
“Paris, steeped in vice and drowned in luxury, feeds her brain on such loathsome literature as might make even coarse-mouthed Rabelais and Swift recoil. Day after day, night after night, the absinthe-drinkers crowd the cafés, and swill the pernicious drug that of all accursed spirits ever brewed to make of man a beast, does most swiftly fly to the seat of reason to there attack and dethrone it;—and yet, the rulers do nothing to check the spreading evil,—the world looks on, purblind as ever and selfishly indifferent,—and the hateful cancer eats on into the breast of France, bringing death closer every day!”
“Wormwood” is undoubtedly a work of genius—a strange, horrible book, yet fraught with a tremendous moral. The story of inhuman vengeance goes swiftly on, without a stop or stay; one feels that the little bride-girl is doomed, that the priest must die, that unutterable misery must be the final lot of all the actors in the story.