“Barbet!” he begged, holding out his hand.  “Five hundred francs!”

“No.  Two hundred,” returned the other.

“Ah! then you have a heart.”

“Yes; but I am a man of business as well.  I have lost a lot of money through you,” he concluded, after giving the history of the failure of Fendant and Cavalier, “will you put me in the way of making some?”

Lucien quivered.

“You are a poet.  You ought to understand all kinds of poetry,” continued the little publisher.  “I want a few rollicking songs at this moment to put along with some more by different authors, or they will be down upon me over the copyright.  I want to have a good collection to sell on the streets at ten sous.  If you care to let me have ten good drinking-songs by to-morrow morning, or something spicy,—­you know the sort of thing, eh!—­I will pay you two hundred francs.”

When Lucien returned home, he found Coralie stretched out straight and stiff on a pallet-bed; Berenice, with many tears, had wrapped her in a coarse linen sheet, and put lighted candles at the four corners of the bed.  Coralie’s face had taken that strange, delicate beauty of death which so vividly impresses the living with the idea of absolute calm; she looked like some white girl in a decline; it seemed as if those pale, crimson lips must open and murmur the name which had blended with the name of God in the last words that she uttered before she died.

Lucien told Berenice to order a funeral which should not cost more than two hundred francs, including the service at the shabby little church of the Bonne-Nouvelle.  As soon as she had gone out, he sat down to a table, and beside the dead body of his love he composed ten rollicking songs to fit popular airs.  The effort cost him untold anguish, but at last the brain began to work at the bidding of Necessity, as if suffering were not; and already Lucien had learned to put Claude Vignon’s terrible maxims in practice, and to raise a barrier between heart and brain.  What a night the poor boy spent over those drinking songs, writing by the light of the tall wax candles while the priest recited the prayers for the dead!

Morning broke before the last song was finished.  Lucien tried it over to a street-song of the day, to the consternation of Berenice and the priest, who thought that he was mad:—­

    Lads, ’tis tedious waste of time
      To mingle song and reason;
    Folly calls for laughing rhyme,
      Sense is out of season. 
  Let Apollo be forgot
    When Bacchus fills the drinking-cup;
  Any catch is good, I wot,
    If good fellows take it up. 
      Let philosophers protest,
        Let us laugh,
          And quaff,
      And a fig for the rest!