A Chair on the Boulevard | Page 4

have grief?"
"Frightful!" he said.
"Perhaps," she added timidly, "you have hunger also?"
"A hunger insupportable, mademoiselle!"
"I myself am extremely hard up, monsieur, but will you permit that I
offer you what I can?"
"Angel!" the young man exclaimed. "There must be wings under your
coat. But I beg of you not to fly yet. I shall tell you the reason of my
grief. If you will do me the honour to seat yourself at the café opposite,
we shall be able to talk more pleasantly."
This appeared strange enough, this invitation from a young man who
she had supposed was starving; but wait a little! Her amazement
increased when, to pay for the wine he had ordered, her companion
threw on to the table a bank-note with a gesture absolutely careless.
She was in danger of distrusting her eyes.
"Is it a dream?" she cried. "Is it a vision from the _Thousand and One
Nights_, or is it really a bank-note?"
"Mademoiselle, it is the mess of pottage," the young man answered
gloomily. "It is the cause of my sadness: for that miserable money, and
more that is to come, I have sold my birthright."
She was on a ship--no, what is it, your expression?--"at sea"!

"I am a poet," he explained; "but perhaps you may not know my work;
I am not celebrated. I am Tricotrin, mademoiselle--Gustave Tricotrin,
at your feet! For years I have written, aided by ambition, and an uncle
who manufactures silk in Lyons. Well, the time is arrived when he is
monstrous, this uncle. He says to me, 'Gustave, this cannot last--you
make no living, you make nothing but debts. (My tragedies he ignores.)
Either you must be a poet who makes money, or you must be a partner
who makes silk,' How could I defy him?--he holds the purse. It was
unavoidable that I stooped. He has given me a sum to satisfy my
creditors, and Monday I depart for Lyons. In the meantime, I take
tender farewells of the familiar scenes I shall perhaps never behold
again."
"How I have been mistaken!" she exclaimed. And then: "But the
hunger you confessed?"
"Of the soul, mademoiselle," said the poet--"the most bitter!"
"And you have no difficulties with the laundress?"
"None," he groaned. "But in the bright days of poverty that have fled
for ever, I have had many difficulties with her. This morning I
reconstituted the situation--I imagined myself without a sou, and
without a collar."
"The little restaurant," she questioned, "where I saw you dining on the
odour?"
"I figured fondly to myself that I was ravenous and that I dared not
enter. It was sublime."
"The mont-de-piété?"
"There imagination restored to me the vanished moments when I have
mounted with suspense, and my least deplorable suit of clothes." His
emotion was profound. "It is my youth to which I am bidding adieu!"
he cried. "It is more than that--it is my aspirations and my renown!"

"But you have said that you have no renown," she reminded him.
"So much the more painful," said the young man; "the hussy we could
not win is always the fairest--I part from renown even more
despairingly than from youth."
She felt an amusement, an interest. But soon it was the turn of him to
feel an interest--the interest that had consequences so important, so
'eart-breaking, so fatales! He had demanded of her, most naturally, her
history, and this she related to him in a style dramatic. Myself, I have
not the style dramatic, though I avow to you I admire that.
"We are in a provincial town," she said to the young man, "we are in
Rouen--the workroom of a modiste. Have no embarrassment, monsieur
Tricotrin, you, at least, are invisible to the girls who sew! They sew all
day and talk little--already they are tristes, resigned. Among them sits
one who is different--one passionate, ambitious--a girl who burns to be
divette, singer, who is devoured by longings for applause, fashion,
wealth. She has made the acquaintance of a little pastrycook. He has
become fascinated, they are affianced. In a month she will be married."
The young man, Tricotrin, well understood that the girl she described
was herself.
"What does she consider while she sits sewing?" she continued. "That
the pastrycook loves her, that he is generous, that she will do her most
to be to him a good wife? Not at all. Far from that! She considers, on
the contrary, that she was a fool to promise him; she considers how she
shall escape--from him, from Rouen, from her ennui-- she seeks to fly
to Paris. Alas! she has no money, not a franc. And she sews--always
she sews in the dull room--and her spirit rebels."
"Good!" said the poet. "It is a capital first