But the tavern was closing and they had to leave.  Jean felt so giddy in the open air he could not tell how he had come to lose Monsieur Tudesco, after emptying the contents of his purse into the latter’s hand.

He wandered about all night in the rain, stumbling through the puddles which splashed up the mud in his face.  His brains buzzed with the maddest schemes, that took shape, jostled one another, and tumbled to pieces in his head.  Sometimes he would stop to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then start off again on his wild way.  Fatigue calmed his nerves, and a clear purpose emerged.  He went straight to the house where the actress lived, and from the street gazed up at her dark, shuttered windows; then, stepping up to the porte-cochere, he kissed the great doors.

XIII

Dating from that night Jean Servien spent his days in translating Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity of pains.  The task having taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which he sent by post to his mistress.  The poem was writ in tears of blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy’s exercise.  Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had kissed in a night of frenzy.

Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his son had grown heedless, absent-minded, and hollow-eyed, coming back late at night, and hardly up before noon.  Before the mute reproach in his father’s eyes the boy hung his head.  But his home-life was nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, hovering around the unknown, in regions he pictured as resplendent with poetry, wealth and pleasure.

Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet the Marquis Tudesco again.  He had found it impossible to replace his waistcoat of ticking.  Moreover, he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to shop-girls.

When the summer came, the theatrical posters announced in quick succession Mithridate, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Rodogune, les Enfants d’Edouard, la Fiammina.  Jean, having secured the money to pay for a seat by hook or by crook, by some bit of trickery or falsehood, by cajoling his aunt or by a surreptitious raid on the cash-box, would watch from an orchestra stall the startling metamorphoses of the woman he loved.  He saw her now girt with the white fillet of the virgins of Hellas, like those figures carved with such an exquisite purity in the marble of the Greek bas-reliefs that they seem clad in inviolate innocence, now in a flowered gown, with powdered ringlets sweeping her naked shoulders, that had an inexpressible charm in their spare outlines suggestive of the bitter-sweet taste of an unripe fruit.  She reminded him in this attire of some old-time pastel of gallant ladies such as the bookbinder’s son had pored over in the dealers’ shops on the Quai Voltaire.  Anon she would be crowned with a hawk’s crest,