The Magic Skin | Page 7

this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, The Lamentations of the glorious king of

Kaernavan, put in prison by his children, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the same
Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.
The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze
among the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled
against the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky:
gray clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all
decreed that he should die.
He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he
remembered that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our
needs before he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had
sought for his snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these
extravagances, and even examined himself; for as he stood aside
against the parapet to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened
somewhat by the contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his
sleeve, to his own surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and
looked forebodingly at the water.
"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman,
who grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"
His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S
APPARATUS.
A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the surface;
he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing
fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put
between notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer; he
heard the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the watermen.
As a corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he lived he was
only a man of talent without patrons, without friends, without a

mattress to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a perfect social
cipher, useless to a State which gave itself no trouble about him.
A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his
mind to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a
world which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his
wanderings again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the
lagging gait of an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps
at the end of the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand
books displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining
for some. He smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets,
and fell to strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner, when
he heard to his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his pocket.
A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his features,
over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and his dark
cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots that flit over
the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is with the black ashes,
so it was with his face, it became dull again when the stranger quickly
drew out his hand and perceived three pennies. "Ah, kind gentleman!
carita, carita; for the love of St. Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy
some bread!"
A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.
Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old pauvre honteux, sickly
and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
thick, muffled voice:
"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for you . . ."
But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment
of wretchedness more bitter than his own.
"La carita! la carita!"
The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the