Would you exult in sight to one born blind,
Or—cruel! of a mother’s love remind
Some hapless orphan boy?
When cold despair has gripped a heart still fond,
When there is no young heart that will respond
To it in love, the future is a lie.
If there is none to weep when he is sad,
And share his woe, a man were better dead!—
And so I soon must die.
Give me your pity! often I blaspheme
The sacred name of God. Does it not seem
That I was born in vain?
Why should I bless him? Or why thank Him, since
He might have made me handsome, rich, a prince—
And I am poor and plain?
“And you have written those verses since yesterday?” cried Clagny in a suspicious tone.
“Dear me, yes, as I was following the game; it is only too evident! I would gladly have done something better for madame.”
“The verses are exquisite!” cried Dinah, casting up her eyes to heaven.
“They are, alas! the expression of a too genuine feeling,” replied Lousteau, in a tone of deep dejection.
The reader will, of course, have guessed that the journalist had stored these lines in his memory for ten years at least, for he had written them at the time of the Restoration in disgust at being unable to get on. Madame de la Baudraye gazed at him with such pity as the woes of genius inspire; and Monsieur de Clagny, who caught her expression, turned in hatred against this sham “Jeune Malade.”1 He sat down to backgammon with the curé of Sancerre. The Presiding Judge’s son was so extremely obliging as to place a lamp near the two players in such a way as that the light fell full on Madame de la Baudraye, who took up her work; she was embroidering in coarse wool a wicker-plait paper-basket. The three conspirators sat close at hand.
“For whom are you decorating that pretty basket, madame?” said Lousteau. “For some charity lottery, perhaps?”
“No,” she said, “I think there is too much display in charity done to the sound of a trumpet.”
“You are very indiscreet,” said Monsieur Gravier.
“Can there be any indiscretion,” said Lousteau, “in inquiring who the happy mortal may be in whose room that basket is to stand?”
“There is no happy mortal in the case,” said Dinah; “it is for Monsieur de la Baudraye.”
The Public Prosecutor looked slyly at Madame de la Baudraye and her work, as if he had said to himself, “I have lost my paper-basket!”
“Why, madame, may we not think him happy in having a lovely wife, happy in her decorating his paper-baskets so charmingly? The colors are red and black, like Robin Goodfellow. If ever I marry, I only hope that twelve years after, my wife’s embroidered baskets may still be for me.”
“And why should they not be for you?” said the lady, fixing her fine gray eyes, full of invitation, on Étienne’s face.
“Parisians believe in nothing,” said the lawyer bitterly. “The virtue of women is doubted above all things with terrible insolence. Yes, for some time past the books you have written, you Paris authors, your farces, your dramas, all your atrocious literature, turn on adultery—”
“Come, come, Monsieur the Public Prosecutor,” retorted Étienne, laughing, “I left you to play your game in peace, I did not attack you, and here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor as a journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the writers you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to attempt something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you must condemn Homer, whose Iliad turns on Helen of Troy; you must condemn Milton’s Paradise Lost. Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of that Louis XIV of Judah; you must make a bonfire of Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l’École des Femmes, Phèdre, Andromaque, le Mariage de Figaro, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc. Excepting Bossuet’s Histoire des Variations and Pascal’s Provinciales, I do not think there are many books left to read if you insist on eliminating all those in which illicit love is mentioned.”
“Much loss that would be!” said Monsieur de Clagny.
Étienne, nettled by the superior air assumed by Monsieur de Clagny, wanted to infuriate him by one of those cold-drawn jests which consist in defending an opinion in which we have no belief, simply to rouse the wrath of a poor man who argues in good faith; a regular journalist’s pleasantry.
“If we take up the political attitude into which you would force yourself,” he went on, without heeding the lawyer’s remark, “and assume the part of Public Prosecutor of all the ages—for every Government has its public ministry—well, the Catholic religion is infected at its fountainhead by a startling instance of illegal union. In the opinion of King Herod, and of Pilate as representing the Roman Empire, Joseph’s wife figured as an adulteress, since, by her avowal, Joseph was not the father of Jesus. The heathen judge could no more recognize the Immaculate Conception than you yourself would admit the possibility of such a miracle if a new religion should nowadays be preached as based on a similar mystery. Do you suppose that a judge and jury in a police court would give credence to the operation of the Holy Ghost! And yet who can venture to assert that God will never again redeem mankind? Is it any better now than it was under Tiberius?”
“Your argument is blasphemy,” said Monsieur de Clagny.
“I grant it,” said the journalist, “but not with malicious intent. You cannot suppress
