"All through."

"What did you think of the two lines that I wrote in it?"

"I realized at once that the woman to whom you had given the volume must have been quite outside the ordinary category, for I could not take those two lines as a mere empty compliment."

"You were right. That woman was an angel. See, read this letter." And he handed to me a paper which seemed to have been many times reread.

I opened it, and this is what it contained:

"MY DEAR ARMAND:--I have received your letter. You are still good, and I thank G.o.d for it. Yes, my friend, I am ill, and with one of those diseases that never relent; but the interest you still take in me makes my suffering less. I shall not live long enough, I expect, to have the happiness of pressing the hand which has written the kind letter I have just received; the words of it would be enough to cure me, if anything could cure me. I shall not see you, for I am quite near death, and you are hundreds of leagues away. My poor friend! your Marguerite of old times is sadly changed. It is better perhaps for you not to see her again than to see her as she is. You ask if I forgive you; oh, with all my heart, friend, for the way you hurt me was only a way of proving the love you had for me. I have been in bed for a month, and I think so much of your esteem that I write every day the journal of my life, from the moment we left each other to the moment when I shall be able to write no longer. If the interest you take in me is real, Armand, when you come back go and see Julie Duprat. She will give you my journal. You will find in it the reason and the excuse for what has pa.s.sed between us.

Julie is very good to me; we often talk of you together. She was there when your letter came, and we both cried over it.

"If you had not sent me any word, I had told her to give you those papers when you returned to France. Do not thank me for it. This daily looking back on the only happy moments of my life does me an immense amount of good, and if you will find in reading it some excuse for the past. I, for my part, find a continual solace in it. I should like to leave you something which would always remind you of me, but everything here has been seized, and I have nothing of my own.

"Do you understand, my friend? I am dying, and from my bed I can hear a man walking to and fro in the drawing-room; my creditors have put him there to see that nothing is taken away, and that nothing remains to me in case I do not die. I hope they will wait till the end before they begin to sell.

"Oh, men have no pity! or rather, I am wrong, it is G.o.d who is just and inflexible!

"And now, dear love, you will come to my sale, and you will buy something, for if I put aside the least thing for you, they might accuse you of embezzling seized goods.

"It is a sad life that I am leaving!

"It would be good of G.o.d to let me see you again before I die. According to all probability, good-bye, my friend. Pardon me if I do not write a longer letter, but those who say they are going to cure me wear me out with bloodletting, and my hand refuses to write any more.

"MARGUERITE GAUTIER."

The last two words were scarcely legible. I returned the letter to Armand, who had, no doubt, read it over again in his mind while I was reading it on paper, for he said to me as he took it:

"Who would think that a kept woman could have written that?" And, overcome by recollections, he gazed for some time at the writing of the letter, which he finally carried to his lips.

"And when I think," he went on, "that she died before I could see her, and that I shall never see her again, when I think that she did for me what no sister would ever have done, I can not forgive myself for having left her to die like that. Dead! Dead and thinking of me, writing and repeating my name, poor dear Marguerite!"

And Armand, giving free outlet to his thoughts and his tears, held out his hand to me, and continued:

"People would think it childish enough if they saw me lament like this over a dead woman such as she; no one will ever know what I made that woman suffer, how cruel I have been to her! how good, how resigned she was! I thought it was I who had to forgive her, and to-day I feel unworthy of the forgiveness which she grants me. Oh, I would give ten years of my life to weep at her feet for an hour!"

It is always difficult to console a sorrow that is unknown to one, and nevertheless I felt so lively a sympathy for the young man, he made me so frankly the confidant of his distress, that I believed a word from me would not be indifferent to him, and I said:

"Have you no parents, no friends? Hope. Go and see them; they will console you. As for me, I can only pity you."

"It is true," he said, rising and walking to and fro in the room, "I am wearying you. Pardon me, I did not reflect how little my sorrow must mean to you, and that I am intruding upon you something which can not and ought not to interest you at all."

"You mistake my meaning. I am entirely at your service; only I regret my inability to calm your distress. If my society and that of my friends can give you any distraction, if, in short, you have need of me, no matter in what way, I hope you will realize how much pleasure it will give me to do anything for you."

"Pardon, pardon," said he; "sorrow sharpens the sensations. Let me stay here for a few minutes longer, long enough to dry my eyes, so that the idlers in the street may not look upon it as a curiosity to see a big fellow like me crying. You have made me very happy by giving me this book. I do not know how I can ever express my grat.i.tude to you."

"By giving me a little of your friendship," said I, "and by telling me the cause of your suffering. One feels better while telling what one suffers."

"You are right. But to-day I have too much need of tears; I can not very well talk. One day I will tell you the whole story, and you will see if I have reason for regretting the poor girl. And now," he added, rubbing his eyes for the last time, and looking at himself in the gla.s.s, "say that you do not think me too absolutely idiotic, and allow me to come back and see you another time."

He cast on me a gentle and amiable look. I was near embracing him.

As for him, his eyes again began to fill with tears; he saw that I perceived it and turned away his head.

"Come," I said, "courage."

"Good-bye," he said.

And, making a desperate effort to restrain his tears, he rushed rather than went out of the room.

I lifted the curtain of my window, and saw him get into the cabriolet which awaited him at the door; but scarcely was he seated before he burst into tears and hid his face in his pocket-handkerchief.

Chapter 5

A good while elapsed before I heard anything more of Armand, but, on the other hand, I was constantly hearing of Marguerite.

I do not know if you have noticed, if once the name of anybody who might in the natural course of things have always remained unknown, or at all events indifferent to you, should be mentioned before you, immediately details begin to group themselves about the name, and you find all your friends talking to you about something which they have never mentioned to you before. You discover that this person was almost touching you and has pa.s.sed close to you many times in your life without your noticing it; you find coincidences in the events which are told you, a real affinity with certain events of your own existence. I was not absolutely at that point in regard to Marguerite, for I had seen and met her, I knew her by sight and by reputation; nevertheless, since the moment of the sale, her name came to my ears so frequently, and, owing to the circ.u.mstance that I have mentioned in the last chapter, that name was a.s.sociated with so profound a sorrow, that my curiosity increased in proportion with my astonishment. The consequence was that whenever I met friends to whom I had never breathed the name of Marguerite, I always began by saying:

"Did you ever know a certain Marguerite Gautier?"

"The Lady of the Camellias?"

"Exactly."

"Oh, very well!"

The word was sometimes accompanied by a smile which could leave no doubt as to its meaning.

"Well, what sort of a girl was she?"

"A good sort of girl."

"Is that all?"

"Oh, yes; more intelligence and perhaps a little more heart than most."

"Do you know anything particular about her?"

"She ruined Baron de G."

"No more than that?"

"She was the mistress of the old Duke of..."

"Was she really his mistress?"

"So they say; at all events, he gave her a great deal of money."