As Hippocrates has said,
      Every jolly fellow,
    When a century has sped,
      Still is fit and mellow. 
  No more following of a lass
    With the palsy in your legs? 
  —­While your hand can hold a glass,
    You can drain it to the dregs,
      With an undiminished zest. 
        Let us laugh,
          And quaff,
      And a fig for the rest!

    Whence we come we know full well. 
      Whiter are we going? 
    Ne’er a one of us can tell,
      ’Tis a thing past knowing. 
  Faith! what does it signify,
    Take the good that Heaven sends;
  It is certain that we die,
    Certain that we live, my friends. 
      Life is nothing but a jest. 
        Let us laugh,
          And quaff,
      And a fig for the rest!

He was shouting the reckless refrain when d’Arthez and Bianchon arrived, to find him in a paroxysm of despair and exhaustion, utterly unable to make a fair copy of his verses.  A torrent of tears followed; and when, amid his sobs, he had told his story, he saw the tears standing in his friends’ eyes.

“This wipes out many sins,” said d’Arthez.

“Happy are they who suffer for their sins in this world,” the priest said solemnly.

At the sight of the fair, dead face smiling at Eternity, while Coralie’s lover wrote tavern-catches to buy a grave for her, and Barbet paid for the coffin—­of the four candles lighted about the dead body of her who had thrilled a great audience as she stood behind the footlights in her Spanish basquina and scarlet green-clocked stockings; while beyond in the doorway, stood the priest who had reconciled the dying actress with God, now about to return to the church to say a mass for the soul of her who had “loved much,”—­all the grandeur and the sordid aspects of the scene, all that sorrow crushed under by Necessity, froze the blood of the great writer and the great doctor.  They sat down; neither of them could utter a word.

Just at that moment a servant in livery announced Mlle. des Touches.  That beautiful and noble woman understood everything at once.  She stepped quickly across the room to Lucien, and slipped two thousand-franc notes into his hand as she grasped it.

“It is too late,” he said, looking up at her with dull, hopeless eyes.

The three stayed with Lucien, trying to soothe his despair with comforting words; but every spring seemed to be broken.  At noon all the brotherhood, with the exception of Michel Chrestien (who, however, had learned the truth as to Lucien’s treachery), was assembled in the poor little church of the Bonne-Nouvelle; Mlle. de Touches was present, and Berenice and Coralie’s dresser from the theatre, with a couple of supernumeraries and the disconsolate Camusot.  All the men accompanied the actress to her last resting-place in Pere Lachaise.  Camusot, shedding hot tears, had solemnly promised Lucien to buy the grave in perpetuity, and to put a headstone above it with the words: