About seven o’clock on a clear evening of early November Catullus arrived in Rome.  With the passage of the weeks his jealous grief had learned to dwell with other emotions, and a longing to be with Lesbia, once more admitted, had reassumed its habitual sway.  Coming first in guise of the need of comfort, it had impelled him to leave Verona, and on the journey it had grown into a lover’s exclusive frenzy.  To-morrow he might examine the structure of his familiar life which had been beaten upon by the storm of sorrow.  To-night his ears rang and his eyes were misty with the desire to see Lesbia.  He had written her that he would call the following morning, but he could not wait.  Stopping only to dress after his journey, fitting himself, he shyly thought, to take her loveliness into his arms, he started for the Palatine.  The full moon illumined the city, but he had no eyes for the marvel wrought upon temples and porticoes.  Clodia’s house stood at the farther end of the hill, her gardens stretching towards the Tiber and offering to her intimates a pleasanter approach than the usual thoroughfare.  To-night he found the entrance gate still open and made his way through the long avenue of cypress trees, hearing his own heart beat in the shadowed silence.  The avenue ended in a wide, open space, dominated by a huge fountain.  The kindly moonlight lent an unwonted grace to the coarse workmanship of the marble Nymphs which sprawled in the waters of the central basin, their shoulders and breasts drenched in silvered spray.  Upon the night air hung the faint scent of late roses.  It had been among summer roses under a summer moon that Catullus had once drunk deepest of Lesbia’s honeyed cup.  This autumn night seemed freighted with the same warmth and sweetness.  He was hurrying forward when he caught sight of two figures turning the corner of a tall box hedge.  His heart leaped and then stood still.  A woman and a man walked to the fountain and sat down upon the carved balustrade.  The woman unfastened her white cloak.  The man laughed low and bent and kissed her white throat where it rose above soft silken folds.  Clodia loosened the folds.  Caelius laughed again.

Catullus never remembered clearly what happened to him that night after he had plunged down the cypress avenue, his feet making no sound on the green turf.  In the mad hours he found his first way into haunts of the Subura which later became familiar enough to him, and at dawn he came home spent.  Standing at his window, he watched the pitiless, grey light break over Rome.  The magic city of the moonlit night, the creation of fragile, reflected radiance, had evanished in bricks and mortar.  The city of his heart, also, built of gossamer dreams and faiths, lay before him, reduced to the hideous realities of impure love and lying friendship.  In the chaos substituted for his accustomed world he recognised only a grave in Troy.