ruined and in utter despair, and who
cared for nothing more in this world, after that took to drinking, used
to get constantly drunk, and rolled from public-house to public-house,
and bar to bar, and as the worst glass of vitrol still cost a penny, he
became reduced to undertaking the part which you have seen, to dabble in
the water, to blacken himself, and to allow himself to be bitten.

"Ah! What a wretched thing life is for those who are kind, and who have
too much heart!"

LILIE LALA

"When I saw her for the first time," Louis d'Arandel said, with the look
of a man who was dreaming and trying to recollect something, "I thought
of some slow and yet passionate music that I once heard, though I do not
remember who was the composer, where there was a fair-haired woman,
whose hair was so silky, so golden, and so vibrating, that her lover had
it cut off after her death, and had the strings of the magic bow of a
violin made out of it, which afterwards emitted such superhuman
complaints and love melodies that they made its hearers love until
death.

"In her eyes there lay the mystery of deep waters, and one was lost in
them, drowned in them like in fathomless depths, and at the corners of
her mouth there lurked that despotic and merciless smile of those women
who do not fear that they may be conquered, who rule over men like cruel
queens, whose hearts remain as virgin as those of the strictest
Carmelite nuns, amidst a flood of lewdness.

"I have seen her angelic head, the bands of her hair, that looked like
plates of gold, her tall, graceful figure, her white, slender, childish
hands, in stained glass windows in churches. She suggested pictures of
the Annunciation, where the Archangel Gabriel descends with ultra-marine
colored wings, and Mary is sitting at her spinning-wheel and spinning,
while uttering pious prayers, and looks like the tall sister of the
white lilies that are growing beside her and the roses.

"When she went through the acacia alley, she appeared on some First
Night in the stage box at one of the theaters, nearly always alone, and
apparently feeling life a great burden, and angry because she could not
change the eternal, dull round of human enjoyment, nobody would have
believed that she went in for a fast life, and that in the annals of
gallantry she was catalogued under the strange name of _Lilie Lala_, and
that no man could rub against her without being irretrievably caught,
and spending h