Norse Tales and Sketches | Page 4

Poverty.'
'Oh, these truffles!' groaned Anatole, holding his stomach.
All at once the room was lit up. Two servants with lamps and candelabra appeared in the _porti��re_; and at the same moment the stranger finished by bringing down his fingers of steel with all his might in a dissonance, so startling, so unearthly, that the whole party sprang up.
'Out with the lamps!' shouted De Silvis.
'No, no!' shrieked Ad��le; 'I dare not be in the dark. Oh, that dreadful man!'
Who was it? Yes, who was it? They involuntarily crowded round the host, and no one noticed the stranger slip out behind the servants.
De Silvis tried to laugh. 'I think it was the devil himself. Come, let us go to the opera.'
'To the opera! Not at any price!' exclaimed Louison. 'I will hear no music for a fortnight.'
'Oh, those truffles!' moaned Anatole.
The party broke up. They had all suddenly realized that they were strangers in a strange place, and each one wished to slip quietly home.
As the journalist conducted Mademoiselle Louison to her carriage, he said: 'Yes, this is the consequence of letting one's self be persuaded to dine with these semi-savages. One is never sure of the company he will meet.'
'Ah, how true! He quite spoiled my good spirits,' said Louison mournfully, turning her swimming eyes upon her companion. 'Will you accompany me to La Trinit��? There is a low mass at twelve o'clock.'
The journalist bowed, and got into the carriage with her.
But as Mademoiselle Ad��le and Monsieur Anatole drove past the English dispensary in the Rue de la Paix, he stopped the driver, and said pleadingly to his fair companion: 'I really think I must get out and get something for those truffles. You will excuse me, won't you? That music, you know.'
'Don't mind me, my friend. Speaking candidly, I don't think either of us is specially lively this evening. Good-night.'
She leant back in the carriage, relieved at finding herself alone; and this light, frivolous creature cried as if she had been whipped whilst she drove homeward.
Anatole was undoubtedly suffering from the truffles, but yet he thought he came to himself as the carriage rolled away. Never in their whole acquaintance had they been so well pleased with each other as at this moment of parting.
'Der liebe Doctor' had come best through the experience, because, being a German, he was hardened in music. All the same, he resolved to take a walk as far as M��ller's brasserie in the Rue Richelieu to get a decent glass of German beer, and perhaps a little bacon, on the top of it all.

A MONKEY.
Yes, it was really a monkey that had nearly procured me 'Laudabilis' [Footnote: A second-class pass.] in my final law examination. As it was, I only got 'Haud'; [Footnote: A third-class pass.] but, after all, this was pretty creditable.
But my friend the advocate, who had daily, with mingled feelings, to read the drafts of my work, found my process-paper so good that he hoped it might raise me into the 'Laud' list. And he did not wish me to suffer the injury and annoyance of being plucked in the _viva voce_ examination, for he knew me and was my friend.
But the monkey was really a coffee-stain on the margin of page 496 of Schweigaard's Process, which I had borrowed from my friend Cucumis.
Going up to a law examination in slush and semi-darkness in mid-winter is one of the saddest experiences that a man can have. It may, indeed, be even worse in summer; but this I have not tried.
One rushes through these eleven papers (or is it thirteen?--it is certainly the most infamous number that the college authorities have been able to devise)--like an unhappy _d��butant_ in a circus. He stands on the back of a galloping horse, with his life in his hands and a silly circus smile on his lips; and so he must leap eleven (or is it thirteen?) times through one of these confounded paper-covered hoops.
The unhappy mortal who passes--or tries to pass--his law examination, finds himself in precisely the same situation, only he does not gallop round a ring, under brilliant gaslight, to the music of a full band. He sits upon a hard chair in semi-darkness with his face to the wall, and the only sound he hears is the creaking of the inspectors' boots. For in all the wide, wide world there are no such creaky boots as those of law examination inspectors.
And so comes the dreadful moment when the black-robed tormentor from the Collegium Juridicum brings in the examination-paper. He plants himself in the doorway, and reads. Coldly, impassively, with a cruel mockery of the horror of the situation, he raises aloft this fateful document--this wretched paper-covered hoop, through which we must all spring, or dismount and wend our way back--on foot!
The candidates settle