Lucien stayed there, on the sloping ground that looks out over Paris,
until the sun had set.
“Who will love me now?” he thought. “My truest friends despise me.
Whatever I might have done, she who lies here would have thought me
wholly noble and good. I have no one left to me now but my sister and
mother and David. And what do they think of me at home?”
Poor distinguished provincial! He went back to the Rue de la Lune; but
the sight of the rooms was so acutely painful, that he could not stay
in them, and he took a cheap lodging elsewhere in the same street. Mlle.
des Touches’ two thousand francs and the sale of the furniture paid the
debts.
Bérénice had two hundred francs left, on which they lived for two
months. Lucien was prostrate; he could neither write nor think; he gave
way to morbid grief. Bérénice took pity upon him.
“Suppose that you were to go back to your own country, how are you to
get there?” she asked one day, by way of reply to an exclamation of
Lucien’s.
“On foot.”
“But even so, you must live and sleep on the way. Even if you walk
twelve leagues a day, you will want twenty francs at least.”
“I will get them together,” he said.
He took his clothes and his best linen, keeping nothing but strict
necessaries, and went to Samanon, who offered fifty francs for his
entire wardrobe. In vain he begged the money-lender to let him have
enough to pay his fare by the coach; Samanon was inexorable. In a
paroxysm of fury, Lucien rushed to Frascati’s, staked the proceeds of
the sale, and lost every farthing. Back once more in the wretched room
in the Rue de la Lune, he asked Bérénice for Coralie’s shawl. The good
girl looked at him, and knew in a moment what he meant to do. He had
confessed to his loss at the gaming-table; and now he was going to hang
himself.
“Are you mad, sir? Go out for a walk, and come back again at midnight.
I will get the money for you; but keep to the Boulevards, do not go
towards the Quais.”
Lucien paced up and down the Boulevards. He was stupid with grief. He
watched the passers-by and the stream of traffic, and felt that he
was alone, and a very small atom in this seething whirlpool of Paris,
churned by the strife of innumerable interests. His thoughts went back
to the banks of his Charente; a craving for happiness and home awoke
in him; and with the craving, came one of the sudden febrile bursts of
energy which half-feminine natures like his mistake for strength. He
would not give up until he had poured out his heart to David Séchard,
and taken counsel of the three good angels still left to him on earth.
As he lounged along, he caught sight of Bérénice—Bérénice in her Sunday
clothes, speaking to a stranger at the corner of the Rue de la Lune and
the filthy Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, where she had taken her stand.
“What are you doing?” asked Lucien, dismayed by a sudden suspicion.
“Here are your twenty francs,” said the girl, slipping four five-franc
pieces into the poet’s hand. “They may cost dear yet; but you can go,”
and she had fled before Lucien could see the way she went; for, in
justice to him, it must be said that the money burned his hand, he
wanted to return it, but he was forced to keep it as the final brand set
upon him by life in Paris.