The Magic Skin | Page 8

footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the
Seine fretted him beyond endurance.
"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.
As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He
looked in delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed

by the satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful
movements entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she
stepped to the pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking
over the delicate outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop,
purchased albums and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins for
them, which glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man,
seemingly occupied with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair
stranger a gaze as eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an
indifferent glance, such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him it
was a leave-taking of love and of woman; but his final and strenuous
questioning glance was neither understood nor felt by the slight-natured
woman there; her color did not rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it
to her? one more piece of adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the
delightful thought at night, "I looked rather well to-day."
The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision of
luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of his
would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the shops,
listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came to an
end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame,
of the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments seemed to
have taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.
Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the outer
world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a painful
trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us
by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed
gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish of
these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses and the
crowd seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He tried to
escape the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of his
physical nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in antiquities,
thinking to give a treat to his senses, and to spend the interval till
nightfall in bargaining over curiosities.
He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the

intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered the
place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set smile like a
drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him?
Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange
colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular pulse was no doubt
the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a burning torrent
through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and stagnant as tepid water.
He merely asked leave to see if the shop contained any curiosities
which he required.
A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine Caliban,
employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard Palissy's
work. This youth remarked carelessly:
"Look round, monsieur! We have nothing very remarkable here
downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I will
show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery,
and some carved ebony--genuine Renaissance work, just come in, and
of perfect beauty."
In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and shopman's
empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow minds
destroy a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it, he
appeared to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or
monosyllables; but imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying
nothing, and gave himself up without hindrance to his closing
meditations, which were appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his
mind had entered by chance on a vast field; and he must see perforce
the dry bones of twenty future worlds.
At a first glance