“Cigarette is right,” said Ramon, with a slight smile.  “Your heart is with your old order.  You are an aristocrat.”

“Indeed I am not, mon ami; I am a mere trooper.”

“Now!  Well, keep your history as you have always done, if you will.  What my friend was matters nothing; I know well what he is, and how true a friend.  As for Milady, she will be best out of your path, Victor.  Women!  God!—­they are so fatal!”

“Does not our folly make their fatality?”

“Not always; not often.  The madness may be ours, but they sow it.  Ah! do they not know how to rouse and enrage it; how to fan, to burn, to lull, to pierce, to slake, to inflame, to entice, to sting?  Heavens! so well they know—­that their beauty must come, one thinks, out of hell itself!”

His great eyes gleamed like fire, his hollow chest panted for breath, the sweat stood out on his temples.  Cecil sought to soothe him, but his words rushed on with the impetuous course of the passionate memories that arose in him.

“Do you know what brought me here?  No!  As little as I know what brought you, though we have been close comrades all these years.  Well, it was she!  I was an artist.  I had no money, I had few friends; but I had youth, I had ambition, I had, I think, genius, till she killed it.  I loved my art with a great love, and I was happy.  Even in Paris one can be so happy without wealth, while one is young.  The mirth of the Barriere—­the grotesques of the Halles—­the wooden booths on New Year’s Day—­the bright midnight crowds under the gaslights—­the bursts of music from the gay cafes—­the gray little nuns flitting through the snow—­the Mardi Gras and the Old-World fooleries—­the summer Sundays under the leaves while we laughed like children—­the silent dreams through the length of the Louvre—­dreams that went home with us and made our garret bright with their visions—­one was happy in them—­happy, happy!”

His eyes were still fastened on the blank, white wall before him while he spoke, as though the things that his words sketched so faintly were painted in all their vivid colors on the dull, blank surface.  And so in truth they were, as remembrance pictured all the thousand perished hours of his youth.

“Happy—­until she looked at me,” he pursued, while his voice flew in feverish haste over the words.  “Why would she not let me be?  She had them all in her golden nets:  nobles, and princes, and poets, and soldiers—­she swept them in far and wide.  She had her empire; why must she seek out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those?  Women are so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, they would not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of them!  It was the first year I touched triumph that I saw her.  They began for the first time to speak of me; it was the little painting of Cigarette, as a child of the army, that did it.  Ah, God!  I thought myself already so famous!  Well, she