The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Henri Murger

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ some friendly bosom on which to pour out all his ideas on the sugar industry, and recited his pamphlet aloud to a pianoforte accompaniment by Schaunard.

      At ten o’clock M. Blancheron and his friend danced a galop together, and thee and thoued each other freely. At eleven they swore never to part, and each made a will leaving the whole of his fortune to the other.

      At midnight Marcel came in and found them weeping in each other’s arms and the studio half an inch deep in water already. Stumbling against the table, he discovered the remains of a splendid banquet, and looking at the bottles saw that they were all perfectly empty.

      Then he tried to wake Schaunard, but that worthy, with his head pillowed on M. Blancheron, threatened to kill him if he took his friend away from him.

      “Ingrate!” was Marcel’s comment, as he drew a handful of hazel nuts from his coat pocket, “and I was bringing him home something for dinner!”

      III

      LENTEN LOVES

      ONE evening in Lent Rodolphe went home early intending to work. But scarcely had he sat down and dipped his pen in the ink when he was disturbed by an unusual sound. Applying his ear to the indiscreet partition wall, he could hear and distinguish perfectly well an onomatopoetic dialogue carried on principally in kisses in the next room.

      “Confound it!” thought Rodolphe as he glanced at the clock. “It is early yet, and my fair neighbour is a Juliet who seldom permits her Romeo to depart with the lark. It is impossible to work to-night.” So taking up his hat he sallied forth.

      As he stepped into the porter’s lodge to hang up his key, he found the portress half imprisoned by the arm of a gallant. The poor woman was so overcome that it was fully five minutes before she could pull the door-string.

      “It is a fact,” mused Rodolphe, “there are moments when portresses become mere women.”

      He opened the street door, and lo! in the corner, a fireman and a cook-maid were exchanging a preliminary token of affection, standing there holding each other by the hand.

      “Egad!” cried he, as he thought of the warrior and his stalwart companion, “here be heretics, who scarcely so much as know that Lent has begun.” And he made for the lodging of a friend in the neighbourhood.

      “If Marcel is at home, we will spend the evening in abusing Colline,” said he to himself. “One must do something, after all.”

      After a vigorous rapping, the door at length stood ajar, and a young man simply dressed in little but a shirt and a pair of eye-glasses put his head out.

      “I cannot ask you to come in,” said this person.

      “Why not?” demanded Rodolphe.

      “There!” said Marcel, as a feminine head appeared from behind a curtain, “that is my answer.”

      “And not a handsome one,” was Rodolphe’s retort after the door had been shut in his face. “So,” said he to himself when he turned into the street, “what next? Suppose I go to Colline’s? We could put in the time abusing Marcel.”

      But as Rodolphe traversed the Rue de l’Ouest, a dark street and little frequented at any time, he perceived a shadowy figure prowling about in a melancholy manner, muttering rimes between its teeth.

      “Hey day!” said Rodolphe, “who is this Sonnet, dancing attendance here? Why, Colline!”

      “Why, Rodolphe! Where are you going?”

      “To your rooms.”

      “You will not find me there.”

      “What are you doing here?”

      “Waiting.”

      “And for what?”

      “Ha!” cried Colline, breaking into mock-heroics. “For what does one wait, when one is twenty years old, and there are stars in heaven and songs in the air?”

      “Speak in prose.”

      “I am waiting for a lady.”

      “Good night,” returned Rodolphe, and he made off, talking to himself. “Bless me! is it St. Cupid’s Day, and can I scarcely take a step without jostling a pair of lovers? This is scandalous and immoral! What can the police be doing?”

      As the Luxembourg Gardens were still open, Rodolphe took the short cut across them. All along the quieter alleys he saw mysterious couples with their arms about each other flit before him, as if scared away by the sound of his footsteps, to seek, in the language of the poet, the double sweetness of silence and shade.

      “It is an evening out of a novel,” said Rodolphe; but the languorous charm grew upon him in spite of himself, and sitting down on a bench, he looked sentimentally up at the moon.

      After a time he felt as if some feverish dream had taken possession of him. It seemed to him that the marble population of gods and heroes were coming down from their pedestals to pay their court to their neighbours the goddesses and heroines of the gardens; indeed, he distinctly heard the big Hercules singing a madrigal to Velleda, and thought that the Druidess’s tunic looked unusually short. From his seat on the bench he watched the swan in the fountain glide across towards a nymph on the bank.

      “Good!” thought Rodolphe, prepared to believe in the whole heathen mythology. “There goes Jupiter to a tryst with Leda! If only the police do not interfere!”

      Resting his forehead on his hands, he deliberately pushed further into the briar-rose wood of sentimentality. But at the finest point in his dream Rodolphe was suddenly awakened by a tap on the shoulder from a policeman.

      “Time to go out, sir,” said the man.

      “A good thing too,” thought Rodolphe. “If I had stayed here for another five minutes I should have had more vergiss-mein-nicht in my heart than ever grew on the banks of the Rhine, or even in Alphonse Karr’s novels.” And he made all haste out of the Luxembourg Gardens, humming in his deep bass voice a sentimental tune which he regarded as the lover’s “Marseillaise.”

      Half an hour after, in some unexplained way, he found himself at the “Prado,” sitting at a table with a glass of punch before him, and chatting with a tall young fellow, famous for his nose—a feature which possessed the singular quality of looking aquiline in profile and like a snub nose when seen full face; a nose of noses—not without sense, with a sufficient experience of love affairs to be able to give sound counsel in such cases and to do a friend a good turn.

      “So you are in love?” Alexandre Schaunard (the owner of the nose) was saying.

      “Yes, my dear boy. It came on quite suddenly just now, like a bad toothache in your heart.”

      “Pass the tobacco,” said Alexandre.

      “Imagine it!” continued Rodolphe. “I have met nothing but lovers for the past two hours—men and women by twos and twos. I took it into my head to go into the Luxembourg, and there I saw all sorts of phantasmagoria, which stirred my heart in an extraordinary way, and set me composing elegies. I bleat and I coo—I am being metamorphosed; I am half СКАЧАТЬ