MADEMOISELLE MIMI
Oh! my friend Rodolphe, what has happened to change you thus? Am I to
believe the rumors that are current, and that this misfortune has broken
down to such a degree your robust philosophy? How can I, the historian
in ordinary of your Bohemian epic, so full of joyous bursts of
laughter, narrate in a sufficiently melancholy tone the painful
adventure which casts a veil over your constant gaiety, and suddenly
checks the ringing flow of your paradoxes?
Oh! Rodolphe, my friend, I admit that the evil is serious, but there,
really it is not worthwhile throwing oneself into the water about it. So
I invite you to bury the past as soon as possible. Shun above all the
solitude peopled with phantoms who would help to render your regrets
eternal. Shun the silence where the echoes of recollection would still
be full of your past joys and sorrows. Cast boldly to all the winds of
forgetfulness the name you have so fondly cherished, and with it all
that still remains to you of her who bore it. Curls pressed by lips mad
with desire, a Venice flask in which there still lurks a remainder of
perfume, which at this moment it would be more dangerous for you to
breathe than all the poisons in the world. To the fire with the flowers,
the flowers of gauze, silk and velvet, the white geraniums, the anemones
empurpled by the blood of Adonis, the blue forget-me-nots and all those
charming bouquets that she put together in the far off days of your
brief happiness. Then I loved her too, your Mimi, and saw no danger in
your loving her. But follow my advice--to the fire with the ribbons, the
pretty pink, blue, and yellow ribbons which she wore round her neck to
attract the eye; to the fire with the lace, the caps, the veils and all
the coquettish trifles with which she bedecked herself to go
love-making with Monsieur Cesar, Monsieur Jerome, Monsieur Charles, or
any other gallant in the calendar, whilst you were awaiting her at your
window, shivering from the wintry blast. To the fire, Rodolphe, and
without pity, with all that belonged to her and could still speak to you
of her; to the fire with the love letters. Ah! here is one of them, and
your tears have bedewed it like a fountain. Oh! my unhappy friend!
"As you have not come in, I am going out to call on my aunt. I have
taken what money there was for a cab."
"Lucille."
That evening, oh! Rodolphe, you had, do you not recollect, to go without
your dinner, and you called on me and let off a volley of jests which
fully attested your tranquillity of mind. For you believed Lucille was
at her aunt's, and if I had not told you that she was with Monsieur
Cesar or with an actor of the Montparnasse Theater, you would have cut
my throat! To the fire, too, with this other note, which has all the
laconic affection of the first.
"I am gone out to order some boots, you must find the money for me to
go and fetch them tomorrow."
Ah! my friend, those boots have danced many quadrilles in which you did
not figure as a partner. To the flames with all these remembrances and
to the winds with their ashes.
But in the first place, oh Rodolphe! for the love of humanity and the
reputation of "The Scarf of Iris" and "The Beaver," resume the reins of
good taste that you have egotistically dropped during your sufferings,
or else horrible things may happen for which you will be responsible. We
may go back to leg-of-mutton sleeves and frilled trousers, and some fine
day see hats come into fashion which would afflict the universe and
call down the wrath of heaven.
And now the moment is come to relate the loves of our friend Rodolphe
and Mimi. It was just as he was turned four and twenty that Rodolphe was
suddenly smitten with the passion that had such an influence upon his
life. At the time he met Mimi he was leading that broken and fantastic
existence that we have tried to describe in the preceding chapters of
this book. He was certainly one of the gayest endurers of poverty in the
world of Bohemia. When in course of the day he had made a poor dinner
and a smart remark, he walked more proudly in his black coat (pleading
for help through every gaping seam) along the pavement that often
promised to be his only resting place for the night, than an emperor in
his purple robe. In the group amongst whom Rodolphe lived, they
affected, after a fashion common enough amongst some young fellows, to
treat love as a thing of luxury, a pretext for jesting. Gustave Colline,
who had for a long time past been in intimate relations with a waistcoat
maker, whom he was rendering deformed in mind and body by obliging her
to sit day and night copying the manuscripts of his philosophical works,
asserted that love was a kind of purgative, good to take at the
beginning of each season in order to get rid of humors. Amidst all these
false sceptics Rodolphe was the only one who dared to talk of love with
some reverence, and when they had the misfortune to let him harp on
this string, he would go on for an hour plaintively wurbling elegies on
the happiness of being loved, the deep blue of the peaceful lake, the
song of the breeze, the harmony of the stars, &c., &c. This mania had
caused him to be nicknamed the harmonica by Schaunard. Marcel had also
made on this subject a very neat remark when, alluding to the
Teutonically sentimental tirades of Rodolphe and to his premature
calvity, he called him the bald forget-me-not. The real truth was this.
Rodolphe then seriously believed he had done with all things of youth
and love; he insolently chanted a _De profundis_ over his heart, which
he thought dead when it was only silent, yet still ready to awake, still
accessible to joy, and more susceptible than ever to all the sweet pangs
that he no longer hoped for, and that were now driving him to despair.
You would have it, Rodolphe, and we shall not pity you, for the disease
from which you are suffering is one of those we long for most, above all
when we know that we are cured of it forever.
Rodolphe then met Mimi, whom he had formerly known when she was the
mistress of one of his friends; and he made her his own. There was at
first a great outcry amongst Rodolphe's friends when they learned of
this union, but as Mademoiselle Mimi was very taking, not at all
prudish, and could stand tobacco smoke and literary conversations
without a headache, they became accustomed to her and treated her as a
comrade. Mimi was a charming girl, and especially adapted for both the
plastic and poetical sympathies of Rodolphe. She was twenty two years of
age, small, delicate, and arch. Her face seemed the first sketch of an
aristocratic countenance, but her features, extremely fine in outline,
and as it were, softly lit up by the light of her clear blue eyes, wore,
at certain moments of weariness or ill-humor, an expression of almost
savage brutality, in which a physiologist would perhaps have recognized
the indication of profound egotism or great insensibility. But hers was
usually a charming head, with a fresh and youthful smile and glances
either tender or full of imperious coquetry. The blood of youth flowed
warm and rapid in her veins, and imparted rosy tints to her transparent
skin of camellia-like whiteness. This unhealthy beauty captivated
Rodolphe, and he often during the night spent hours in covering with
kisses the pale forehead of his slumbering mistress, whose humid and
weary eyes shone half-closed beneath the curtain of her magnificent
brown hair. But what contributed above all to make Rodolphe madly in
love with Mademoiselle Mimi were her hands, which in spite of household
cares, she managed to keep as white as those of the Goddess of Idleness.
However, these hands so frail, so tiny, so soft to the lips; these
child-like hands in which Rodolphe had placed his once more awakened
heart; these white hands of Mademoiselle Mimi were soon to rend that
heart with their rosy nails.
At the end of a month Rodolphe began to perceive that he was wedded to
a thunderstorm, and that his mistress had one great fault. She was a
"gadabout," as they say, and spent a great part of her time amongst the
kept women of the neighborhood, whose acquaintance she had made. The
result that Rodolphe had feared, when he perceived the relations
contracted by his mistress, soon took place. The variable opulence of
some of her new friends caused a forest of ambitious ideas to spring up
in the mind of Mademoiselle Mimi, who up until then had only had modest
tastes, and was content with the necessaries of life that Rodolphe did
his best to procure for her. Mimi began to dream of silks, velvets, and
lace. And, despite Rodolphe's prohibition, she continued to frequent
these women, who were all of one mind in persuading her to break off
with the Bohemian who could not even give her a hundred and fifty francs
to buy a stuff dress.
"Pretty as you are," said her advisers, "you can easily secure a better
position. You have only to look for it."
And Mademoiselle Mimi began to look. A witness of her frequent absences,
clumsily accounted for, Rodolphe entered upon the painful track of
suspicion. But as soon as he felt himself on the trail of some proof of
infidelity, he eagerly drew a bandage over his eyes in order to see
nothing. However, a strange, jealous, fantastic, quarrelsome love which
the girl did not understand, because she then only felt for Rodolphe
that lukewarm attachment resulting from habit. Besides, half of her
heart had already been expended over her first love, and the other half
was still full of the remembrance of her first lover.
Eight months passed by in this fashion, good and evil days alternating.
During this period Rodolphe was a score of times on the point of
separating from Mademoiselle Mimi, who had for him all the clumsy
cruelties of the woman who does not love. Properly speaking, this life
had become a hell for both. But Rodolphe had grown accustomed to these
daily struggles, and dreaded nothing so much as a cessation of this
state of things; for he felt that with it would cease forever the fever
and agitations of youth that he had not felt for so long. And then, if
everything must be told, there were hours in which Mademoiselle Mimi
knew how to make Rodolphe forget all the suspicions that were tearing at
his heart. There were moments when she caused him to bend like a child
at her knee beneath the charm of her blue eyes--the poet to whom she had
given back his lost poetry--the young man to whom she had restored his
youth, and who, thanks to her, was once more beneath love's equator. Two
or three times a month, amidst these stormy quarrels, Rodolphe and Mimi
halted with one accord at the verdant oasis of a night of love, and for
whole hours would give himself up to addressing her in that charming yet
absurd language that passion improvises in its hour of delirium. Mimi
listened calmly at first, rather astonished than moved, but, in the end,
the enthusiastic eloquence of Rodolphe, by turns tender, lively, and
melancholy, won on her by degrees. She felt the ice of indifference that
numbed her heart melt at the contact of the love; she would throw
herself on Rodolphe's breast, and tell him by kisses all that she was
unable to tell him in words. And dawn surprised them thus enlaced
together--eyes fixed on eyes, hands clasped in hands--whilst their moist
and burning lips were still murmuring that immortal word "that for five
thousand years has lingered nightly on lovers' lips."
But the next day the most futile pretext brought about a quarrel, and
love alarmed fled again for some time.
In the end, however, Rodolphe perceived that if he did not take care the
white hands of Mademoiselle Mimi would lead him to an abyss in which he
would leave his future and his youth. For a moment stern reason spoke in
him more strongly than love, and he convinced himself by strong
arguments, backed up by proofs, that his mistress did not love him. He
went so far as to say to himself, that the hours of love she granted him
were nothing but a mere sensual caprice such as married women feel for
their husbands when they long for a cashmere shawl or a new dress, or
when their lover is away, in accordance with the proverb that half a
loaf is better than no bread. In short, Rodolphe could forgive his
mistress everything except not being loved. He therefore took a supreme
resolution, and announced to Mademoiselle Mimi that she would have to
look out for another lover. Mimi began to laugh and to utter bravados.
In the end, seeing that Rodolphe was firm in his resolve, and greeted
her with extreme calmness when she returned home after a day and a night
spent out of the house, she began to grow a little uneasy in face of
this firmness, to which she was not accustomed. She was then charming
for two or three days. But her lover did not go back on what he had
said, and contented himself with asking whether she had found anyone.
"I have not even looked," she replied.
However, she had looked, and even before Rodolphe had advised her to do
so. In a fortnight she had made two essays. One of her friends had
helped her, and had at first procured her the acquaintance of a very
tender youth, who had unfolded before Mimi's eyes a horizon of Indian
cashmeres and suites of furniture in rosewood. But in the opinion of
Mimi herself this young schoolboy, who might be very good at algebra,
was not very advanced in the art of love, and as she did not like
undertaking education, she left her amorous novice on the lurch, with
his cashmeres still browsing on the plains of Tibet, and his rosewood
furniture still growing in the forests of the New World.
The schoolboy was soon replaced by a Breton gentleman, with whom Mimi
was soon rapidly smitten, and she had no need to pray long before
becoming his nominal countess.
Despite his mistress's protestations, Rodolphe had wind of some
intrigue. He wanted to know exactly how matters stood, and one morning,
after a night during which Mademoiselle Mimi had not returned, hastened
to the place where he suspected her to be. There he was able to strike
home at his heart with one of those proofs to which one must give
credence in spite of oneself. He saw Mademoiselle Mimi, with two eyes
encircled with an aureola of satisfied voluptuousness, leaving the
residence in which she had acquired her title of nobility, on the arm of
her new lord and master, who, to tell the truth, appeared far less proud
of her new conquest than Paris after the rape of Helen.
On seeing her lover appear, Mademoiselle Mimi seemed somewhat surprised.
She came up to him, and for five minutes they talked very quietly
together. They then parted, each on their separate way. Their separation
was agreed upon.
Rodolphe returned home, and spent the day in packing up all the things
belonging to his mistress.
During the day that followed his divorce, he received the visit of
several friends, and announced to them what had happened. Every one
congratulated him on this event as on a piece of great good fortune.
"We will aid you, oh poet!" said one of those who had been the most
frequent spectator of the annoyances Mademoiselle Mimi had made Rodolphe
undergo, "we will help you to free your heart from the clutches of this
evil creature. In a little while you will be cured, and quite ready to
rove with another Mimi along the green lanes of Aulnay and
Fontenay-aux-Roses."
Rodolphe swore that he had forever done with regrets and despair. He
even let himself be led away to the Bal Mabille, when his dilapidated
get-up did scant honor to "The Scarf of Iris," his editorship of which
procured him free admission to this garden of elegance and pleasure.
There Rodolphe met some fresh friends, with whom he began to drink. He
related to them his woes an unheard of luxury of imaginative style, and
for an hour was perfectly dazzling with liveliness and go. "Alas!" said
the painter Marcel, as he listened to the flood of irony pouring from
his friend's lips, "Rodolphe is too lively, far too lively."
"He is charming," replied a young woman to whom Rodolphe had just
offered a bouquet, "and although he is very badly got up I would
willingly compromise myself by dancing with him if he would invite me."
Two seconds later Rodolphe, who had overheard her, was at her feet,
enveloping his invitation in a speech, scented with all the musk and
benjamin of a gallantry at eighty degrees Richelieu. The lady was
confounded by the language sparkling with dazzling adjectives and
phrases modelled on those in vogue during the Regency, and the
invitation was accepted.
Rodolphe was as ignorant of the elements of dancing as of the rule of
three. But he was impelled by an extraordinary audacity. He did not
hesitate, but improvised a dance unknown to all bygone choreography. It
was a step the originality of which obtained an incredible success, and
that has been celebrated under the title of "regrets and sighs." It was
all very well for the three thousand jets of gas to blink at him,
Rodolphe went on at it all the same, and continued to pour out a flood
of novel madrigals to his partner.
"Well," said Marcel, "this is incredible. Rodolphe reminds me of a
drunken man rolling amongst broken glass."
"At any rate he has got hold of a deuced fine woman," said another,
seeing Rodolphe about to leave with his partner.
"Won't you say good night?" cried Marcel after him.
Rodolphe came back to the artist and held out his hand, it was cold and
damp as a wet stone.
Rodolphe's companion was a strapping Normandy wench, whose native
rusticity had promptly acquired an aristocratic tinge amidst the
elegancies of Parisian luxury and an idle life. She was styled Madame
Seraphine, and was for the time being mistress of an incarnate
rheumatism in the shape of a peer of France, who gave her fifty louis a
month, which she shared with a counter-jumper who gave her nothing but
hard knocks. Rodolphe had pleased her, she hoped that he would not think
of giving her anything, and took him off home with her.
"Lucille," said she to her waiting maid, "I am not at home to anyone."
And passing into her bedroom, she came out ten minutes later, in a
special costume. She found Rodolphe dumb and motionless, for since he
had come in he had been plunged, despite himself, into a gloom full of
silent sobs.
"Why you no longer look at me or speak to me!" said the astonished
Seraphine.
"Come," said Rodolphe to himself, lifting his head. "Let us look at her,
but only for the sake of art."
"And then what a sight met his eyes," as Raoul says in "The Huguenots."
Seraphine was admirable beautiful. Her splendid figure, cleverly set off
by the cut of her solitary garment, showed itself provocatively through
the half-transparent material. All the imperious fever of desire woke
afresh in Rodolphe's veins. A warm mist mounted to his brain. He looked
at Seraphine otherwise than from a purely aesthetic point of view and
took the pretty girl's hands in his own. They were divine hands, and
might have been wrought by the purest chisels of Grecian statuary.
Rodolphe felt these admirable hands tremble in his own, and feeling less
and less of an art critic, he drew towards him Seraphine, whose face was
already tinged with that flush which is the aurora of voluptuousness.
"This creature is a true instrument of pleasure, a real Stradivarius of
love, and one on which I would willingly play a tune," thought Rodolphe,
as he heard the fair creature's heart beating a hurried charge in a very
distinct fashion.
At that moment there was a violent ring at the door of the rooms.
"Lucile, Lucile," cried Seraphine to the waiting maid, "do not let
anyone in, say I am not home yet."
At the name of Lucile uttered twice, Rodolphe rose.
"I do not wish to incommode you in any way, madame," said he. "Besides,
I must take my leave, it is late and I live a long way off. Good
evening."
"What! You are going?" exclaimed Seraphine, augmenting the fire of her
glances. "Why, why should you go? I am free, you can stay."
"Impossible," replied Rodolphe, "I am expecting one of my relatives who
is coming from Terra del Fuego this evening, and he would disinherit me
if he did not find me waiting to receive him. Good evening, madame."
And he quitted the room hurriedly. The servant went to light him out.
Rodolphe accidentally cast his eye on her. She was a delicate looking
girl, with slow movements; her extremely pale face offered a charming
contrast to her dark and naturally curling hair, whilst her blue eyes
resembled two sickly stars.
"Oh phantom!" exclaimed Rodolphe, shrinking from one who bore the name
and the face of his mistress. "Away, what would you with me?" And he
rushed down the stairs.
"Why, madame," said the lady's maid, returning to her mistress's room.
"The young fellow is mad."
"Say rather that he is a fool," claimed the exasperated Seraphine. "Oh!"
she continued, "this will teach me to show kindness. If only that brute
of a Leon had the sense to drop in now!"
Leon was the gentleman whose love carried a whip.
Rodolphe ran home without waiting to take breath. Going upstairs he
found his carroty-haired cat giving vent to piteous mewings. For two
nights already it has thus been vainly summoning its faithless love, an
agora Manon Lescaut, who had started on a campaign of gallantry on the
house-tops adjacent.
"Poor beast," said Rodolphe, "you have been deceived. Your Mimi has
jilted you like mine has jilted me. Bah! Let us console ourselves. You
see, my poor fellow, the hearts of women and she-cats are abysses that
neither men nor toms will ever fathom."
When he entered his room, although it was fearfully hot, Rodolphe seemed
to feel a cloak of ice about his shoulders. It was the chill of
solitude, that terrible nocturnal solitude that nothing disturbs. He lit
his candle and then perceived the ravaged room. The gaping drawers in
the furniture showed empty, and from floor to ceiling sadness filled the
little room that seemed to Rodolphe vaster than a desert. Stepping
forward he struck his foot against the parcels containing the things
belonging to Mademoiselle Mimi, and he felt an impulse of joy to find
that she had not yet come to fetch them as she had told him in the
morning she would do. Rodolphe felt that, despite all his struggles, the
moment of reaction was at hand, and readily divined that a cruel night
was to expiate all the bitter mirth that he had dispensed in the course
of the evening. However, he hoped that his body, worn out with fatigue,
would sink to sleep before the reawakening of the sorrows so long pent
back in his heart.
As he approached the couch, and on drawing back the curtains saw the bed
that had not been disturbed for two days, the pillows placed side by
side, beneath one of which still peeped out the trimming of a woman's
night cap, Rodolphe felt his heart gripped in the pitiless vice of that
desolate grief that cannot burst forth. He fell at the foot of the bed,
buried his face in his hands, and, after having cast a glance round the
desolate room, exclaimed:
"Oh! Little Mimi, joy of my home, is it really true that you are gone,
that I have driven you away, and that I shall never see you again, my
God. Oh! Pretty brown curly head that has slept so long on this spot,
will you never come back to sleep here again? Oh! Little white hands
with the blue veins, little white hands to whom I had affianced my lips,
have you too received my last kiss?"
And Rodolphe, in delirious intoxication, plunged his head amongst the
pillows, still impregnated with the perfume of his love's hair. From the
depth of the alcove he seemed to see emerge the ghosts of the sweet
nights he had passed with his young mistress. He heard clear and
sonorous, amidst the nocturnal silence, the open-hearted laugh of
Mademoiselle Mimi, and he thought of the charming and contagious gaiety
with which she had been able so many times to make him forget all the
troubles and all the hardships of their hazardous existence.
Throughout the night he kept passing in review the eight months that he
had just spent with this girl, who had never loved him perhaps, but
whose tender lies had restored to Rodolphe's heart its youth and
virility.
Dawn surprised him at the moment when, conquered by fatigue, he had just
closed his eyes, red from the tears shed during the night. A doleful and
terrible vigil, yet such a one as even the most sneering and sceptical
amongst us may find in the depths of their past.
When his friends called on him in the morning they were alarmed at the
sight of Rodolphe, whose face bore the traces of all the anguish that
had awaited him during his vigil in the Gethsemane of love.
"Good!" said Marcel, "I was sure of it; it is his mirth of yesterday
that has turned in his heart. Things must not go on like this."
And in concert with two or three comrades he began a series of privately
indiscreet revelations respecting Mademoiselle Mimi, every word of which
pierced like a thorn in Rodolphe's heart. His friends "proved" to him
that all the time his mistress had tricked him like a simpleton at home
and abroad, and that this fair creature, pale as the angel of phthisis,
was a casket filled with evil sentiments and ferocious instincts.
One and another they thus took it in turns at the task they had set
themselves, which was to bring Rodolphe to that point at which soured
love turns to contempt; but this object was only half attained. The
poet's despair turned to wrath. He threw himself in a rage upon the
packages which he had done up the day before, and after having put on
one side all the objects that his mistress had in her possession when
she came to him, kept all those he had given her during their union,
that is to say, by far the greater number, and, above all, the articles
connected with the toilette to which Mademoiselle Mimi was attached by
all the fibers of a coquetry that had of late become insatiable.
Mademoiselle Mimi called in course of the next day to take away her
things. Rodolphe was at home and alone. It needed all his powers of self
esteem to keep him from throwing himself upon his mistress's neck. He
gave her a reception full of silent insult, and Mademoiselle Mimi
replied by those cold and keen scoffs that drive the weakest and most
timid to show their teeth. In face of the contempt with which his
mistress flagellated him with insolent hardihood, Rodolphe's anger broke
out fearfully and brutally. For a moment Mimi, white with terror, asked
herself whether she would escape from his hands alive. At the cries she
uttered some neighbors rushed in and dragged her out of Rodolphe's room.
Two days later a female friend of Mimi came to ask Rodolphe whether he
would give up the things he had kept.
"No," he replied.
And he got his mistress's messenger to talk about her. She informed him
that Mimi was in a very unfortunate condition, and that she would soon
find herself without a lodging.
"And the lover of whom she is so fond?"
"Oh!" replied Amelie, the friend in question, "the young fellow has no
intention of taking her for his mistress. He has been keeping another
for a long time past, and he does not seem to trouble much about Mimi,
who is living at my expense, which causes me a great deal of
embarrassment."
"Let her do as she can," said Rodolphe. "She would have it,--it is no
affair of mine."
And he began to sing madrigals to Mademoiselle Amelie, and persuaded her
that she was the prettiest woman in the world.
Amelie informed Mimi of her interview with Rodolphe.
"What did he say? What is he doing? Did he speak to you about me?" asked
Mimi.
"Not at all; you are already forgotten, my dear. Rodolphe has a fresh
mistress, and he has bought her a superb outfit, for he has received a
great deal of money, and is himself dressed like a prince. He is a very
amiable fellow, and said a lot of nice things to me."
"I know what all that means," thought Mimi.
Every day Mademoiselle Amelie called to see Rodolphe on some pretext or
other, and however much the latter tried he could not help speaking of
Mimi to her.
"She is very lively," replied her friend, "and does not seem to trouble
herself about her position. Besides she declares that she will come back
to you whenever she chooses, without making any advances and merely for
the sake of vexing your friends."
"Very good," said Rodolphe, "let her come and we shall see."
And he began to pay court to Amelie, who went off to tell everything to
Mimi, and to assure her that Rodolphe was very much in love with
herself.
"He kissed me again on the hand and the neck; see it is quite red," said
she. "He wants to take me to a dance tomorrow."
"My dear friend," said Mimi, rather vexed, "I see what you are driving
at, to make me believe that Rodolphe is in love with you and thinks no
more about me. But you are wasting your time both for him and me."
The fact was that Rodolphe only showed himself amiable towards Amelie
to get her to call on him the oftener, and to have the opportunity of
speaking to her about his mistress. But with a Machiavelism that had
perhaps its object, and whilst perceiving very well that Rodolphe still
loved Mimi, and that the latter was not indisposed to rejoin him, Amelie
strove, by ingeniously inventive reports, to fend off everything that
might serve to draw the pair together again.
The day on which she was to go to the ball Amelie called in the morning
to ask Rodolphe whether the engagement still held good.
"Yes," he replied, "I do not want to miss the opportunity of being the
cavalier of the most beautiful woman of the day."
Amelie assumed the coquettish air that she had put on the occasion of
her solitary appearance at a suburban theater as fourth chambermaid, and
promised to be ready that evening.
"By the way," said Rodolphe, "tell Mademoiselle Mimi that if she will be
guilty of an infidelity to her lover in my favor, and come and pass a
night with me, I will give her up all her things."
Amelie executed Rodolphe's commission, and gave to his words quite
another meaning than that which she had guessed they bore.
"Your Rodolphe is a rather base fellow," said she to Mimi. "His proposal
is infamous. He wishes by this step to make you descend to the rank of
the vilest creatures, and if you go to him not only will he not give you
your things, but he will show you up as a jest to all his comrades. It
is a plot arranged amongst them."
"I will not go," said Mimi, and as she saw Amelie engaged in preparing
her toilette, she asked her whether she was going to the ball.
"Yes," replied the other.
"With Rodolphe?"
"Yes, he is to wait for me this evening twenty yards or so from here."
"I wish you joy," said Mimi, and seeing the hour of the appointment
approach, she hurried off to Mademoiselle Amelie's lover, and informed
him that the latter was engaged in a little scheme to deceive him with
her own old lover.
The gentleman, jealous as a tiger and brutal to boot, called at once on
Mademoiselle Amelie, and announced that he would like her to spend the
evening in his company.
At eight o'clock Mimi flew to the spot at which Rodolphe was to meet
Amelie. She saw her lover pacing up and down after the fashion of a man
waiting for some one, and twice passed close to him without daring to
address him. Rodolphe was very well dressed that evening, and the
violent crises through which he had passed during the week had imparted
great character on his face. Mimi was singularly moved. At length she
made up her mind to speak to him. Rodolphe received her without anger,
and asked how she was, after which he inquired as to the motive that had
brought her to him, in mild voice, in which there was an effort to
check a note of sadness.
"It is bad news that I come to bring you. Mademoiselle Amelie cannot
come to the ball with you. Her lover is keeping her."
"I shall go to the ball alone, then."
Here Mademoiselle Mimi feigned to stumble, and leaned against Rodolphe's
shoulder. He took her arm and proposed to escort her home.
"No," said Mimi. "I am living with Amelie, and as her lover is there I
cannot go in until he has left."
"Listen to me, then," said the poet. "I made a proposal to you today
through Mademoiselle Amelie. Did she transmit it to you?"
"Yes," said Mimi, "but in terms which, even after what has happened, I
could not credit. No, Rodolphe, I could not believe that, despite all
that you might have to reproach me with, you thought me so worthless as
to accept such a bargain."
"You did not understand me, or the message has been badly conveyed to
you. My offer holds good," said Rodolphe. "It is nine o'clock. You still
have three hours for reflection. The door will be unlocked until
midnight. Good night. Farewell, or--till we meet again."
"Farewell, then," said Mimi, in trembling tones.
And they separated. Rodolphe went home and threw himself, without
undressing, upon his bed. At half past eleven, Mademoiselle Mimi entered
his room.
"I have come to ask your hospitality," said she. "Amelie's lover has
stayed with her, and I cannot get in."
They talked together until three in the morning--an explanatory
conversation which grew gradually more familiar.
At four o'clock their candle went out. Rodolphe wanted to light another.
"No," said Mimi, "it is not worth the trouble. It is quite time to go to
bed."
Five minutes later her pretty brown curly head had once more resumed its
place on the pillow, and in a voice full of affection she invited
Rodolphe's lips to feast on her little white hand with their blue veins,
the pearly pallor of which vied with the whiteness of the sheets.
Rodolphe did not light the candle.
In the morning Rodolphe got up first, and pointing out several packages
to Mimi, said to her, very gently, "There is what belongs to you. You
can take it away. I keep my word."
"Oh!" said Mimi. "I am very tired, you see, and I cannot carry all these
heavy parcels away at once. I would rather call again."
And when she was dressed she only took a collar and a pair of cuffs.
"I will take away the rest by degrees," she added, smiling.
"Come," said Rodolphe, "take away all or take away none, and let there
be an end of it."
"Let it, on the contrary, begin again, and, above all, let it last,"
said Mimi, kissing Rodolphe.
After breakfasting together they started off for a day in the country.
Crossing the Luxembourg gardens Rodolphe met a great poet who had always
received him with charming kindness. Out of respect for the
conventionalities Rodolphe was about to pretend not to see him but the
poet did not give him time, and passing by him greeted him with a
friendly gesture and his companion with a smile.
"Who is that gentleman?" asked Mimi.
Rodolphe answered her by mentioning a name which made her blush with
pleasure and pride.
"Oh!" said Rodolphe. "Our meeting with the poet who has sung of love so
well is a good omen, and will bring luck to our reconciliation."
"I do love you," said Mimi, squeezing his hand, although they were in
the midst of the crowd.
"Alas!" thought Rodolphe. "Which is better; to allow oneself always to
be deceived through believing, or never to believe for fear of always
being deceived?"