They threw their arms about each other’s neck, and the carriage stopped.  Once on the sidewalk, Amedee noticed his friend’s wry face as he saw the home of the Gerards, a miserable, commonplace lodging-house, whose crackled plastered front made one think of the wrinkles on a poor man’s face.  On the right and on the left of the entrance-door were two shops, one a butcher’s, the other a fruiterer’s, exhaling their fetid odors.  But Amedee paid no attention to the delicate Maurice’s repugnance, saying: 

“Do you see that little garden at the end of the walk?  It is there.  Au revoir.”

They separated with a last grasp of the hand.  The poet saw Maurice enter the dark alley, cross the narrow court and push the gate open into the garden, and then disappear among the mass of verdure.  How many times Amedee had passed through there, moved at the thought that he was going to see Maria; and Maurice crossed this threshold for the first time in his life to take her away.  He wanted her!  He had himself given his beloved to another!  He had begged, almost forced his rival, so to speak, to rob him of his dearest hope!  What sorrow!

Amedee gave his address to the driver and entered the carriage again.  A cold autumn rain had commenced to fall, and he was obliged to close the windows.  As he was jolted harshly through the streets of Paris at a trot, the young poet, all of a shiver, saw carriages streaming with water, bespattered pedestrians under their umbrellas, a heavy gloom fall from the leaden sky; and Amedee, stupefied with grief, felt a strange sensation of emptiness, as if somebody had taken away his heart.

When he entered his room, the sight of his furniture, his engravings, his books on their shelves, and his table covered with its papers distressed him.  His long evenings of study near this lamp, the long hours of thought over some difficult work, the austere and cheerless year that he had lived there, all had been dedicated to Maria.  It was in order to obtain her some day, that he had labored so assiduously and obstinately!  And now the frivolous and guilty child was doubtless weeping for joy in Maurice’s arms, her husband to-morrow?

Seated before his table, with his head buried in his hands, Amedee sank into the depths of melancholy.  His life seemed such a failure, his fate so disastrous, his future so gloomy, he felt so discouraged and lonely, that for the moment the courage to live deserted him.  It seemed to him that an invisible hand touched him upon the shoulder with compassion, and he had at once a desire and a fear to turn around and look; for he knew very well that this hand was that of the dead.  He did not fancy it under the hideous aspect of a skeleton, but as a calm, sad, but yet very sweet face which drew him against its breast with a mother’s tenderness, and made him and his grief sleep—­a sleep without dreams, profound and eternal.  Suddenly he turned around and uttered a frightful cry.  For a moment he thought he saw, extended at his feet, and still holding a razor in his hand, the dead body of his unhappy father, a horrible wound in his throat, and his thin gray hair in a pool of blood!