CORALIE

AGED NINETEEN YEARS

August, 1822

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.

Berenice 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.  Berenice 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 Berenice 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 Sechard, and taken counsel of the three good angels still left to him on earth.

As he lounged along, he caught sight of Berenice—­Berenice 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.