The fin de siècle reader, disgusted at the thought of such an orgy as I have been trying to describe, must remember that it happened in the fifties, when men calling themselves gentlemen, and being called so, still wrenched off doorknockers and came back drunk from the Derby, and even drank too much after dinner before joining the ladies, as is all duly chronicled and set down in John Leech’s immortal pictures of life and character out of Punch.
Then M. and Mme. Vinard and Trilby and Angèle Boisse bade the company good night, Trilby being the last of them to leave.
Little Billee took her to the top of the staircase, and there he said to her:
“Trilby, I have asked you nineteen times, and you have refused. Trilby, once more, on Christmas night, for the twentieth time—will you marry me? If not, I leave Paris tomorrow morning, and never come back. I swear it on my word of honor!”
Trilby turned very pale, and leaned her back against the wall, and covered her face with her hands.
Little Billee pulled them away.
“Answer me, Trilby!”
“God forgive me, yes!” said Trilby, and she ran downstairs, weeping.
It was now very late.
It soon became evident that Little Billee was in extraordinary high spirits—in an abnormal state of excitement.
He challenged Svengali to spar, and made his nose bleed, and frightened him out of his sardonic wits. He performed wonderful and quite unsuspected feats of strength. He swore eternal friendship to Dodor and Zouzou, and filled their glasses again and again, and also (in his innocence) his own, and trinquéd with them many times running. They were the last to leave (except the three helpless policemen); and at about five or six in the morning, to his surprise, he found himself walking between Dodor and Zouzou by a late windy moonlight in the Rue Vieille des Mauvais Ladres, now on one side of the frozen gutter, now on the other, now in the middle of it, stopping them now and then to tell them how jolly they were and how dearly he loved them.
Presently his hat flew away, and went rolling and skipping and bounding up the narrow street, and they discovered that as soon as they let each other go to run after it, they all three sat down.
So Dodor and Little Billee remained sitting, with their arms round each other’s necks and their feet in the gutter, while Zouzou went after the hat on all fours, and caught it, and brought it back in his mouth like a tipsy retriever. Little Billee wept for sheer love and gratitude, and called him a caryhatide (in English), and laughed loudly at his own wit, which was quite thrown away on Zouzou! “No man ever had such dear, dear frenge! no man ever was s’happy!”
After sitting for a while in love and amity, they managed to get up on their feet again, each helping the other; and in some never-to-be-remembered way they reached the Hôtel Corneille.
There they sat little Billee on the doorstep and rang the bell, and seeing someone coming up the Place de l’Odéon, and fearing he might be a sergent de ville, they bid Little Billee a most affectionate but hasty farewell, kissing him on both cheeks in French fashion, and contriving to get themselves round the corner and out of sight.
Little Billee tried to sing Zouzou’s drinking-song:
“Quoi de plus doux
Que les glougloux—
Les glougloux du vin à quat’ sous. …”
The stranger came up. Fortunately, it was no sergent de ville, but Ribot, just back from a Christmas-tree and a little family dance at his aunt’s, Madame Kolb (the Alsacian banker’s wife, in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin).
Next morning poor Little Billee was dreadfully ill.
He had passed a terrible night. His bed had heaved like the ocean, with oceanic results. He had forgotten to put out his candle, but fortunately Ribot had blown it out for him, after putting him to bed and tucking him up like a real good Samaritan.
And next morning, when Madame Paul brought him a cup of tisane de chiendent (which does not happen to mean a hair of the dog that bit him), she was kind, but very severe on the dangers and disgrace of intoxication, and talked to him like a mother.
“If it had not been for kind Monsieur Ribot” (she told him), “the doorstep would have been your portion; and who could say you didn’t deserve it? And then think of the dangers of fire from a tipsy man all alone in a small bedroom with chintz curtains and a lighted candle!”
“Ribot was kind enough to blow out my candle,” said Little Billee, humbly.
“Ah, Dame!” said Madame Paul, with much meaning—“au moins il a bon cœur, Monsieur Ribot!”
And the cruelest sting of all was when the good-natured and incorrigibly festive Ribot came and sat by his bedside, and was kind and tenderly sympathetic, and got him a pick-me-up from the chemist’s (unbeknown to Madame Paul).
“Credieu! vous vous êtes crânement bien amusé, hier soir! quelle bosse, hein! je parie que c’était plus drôle que chez ma tante Kolb!”
All of which, of course, it is unnecessary to translate; except, perhaps, the word bosse, which stands for noce, which stands for a “jolly good spree.”
In all his innocent little life Little Billee had never dreamed of such humiliation as this—such ignominious depths of shame and misery and remorse! He did
