to a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the
resplendent Julie!--true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in
the Bois had once been the envy of duchesses--Julie! who had sacrificed
fortune for his sake--who, freed from him, could have millionaires again
at her feet!--Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save
an erring nursemaid--Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written
to him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in
blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:

"Traitor!--I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to
love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it--woe
to her! Ingrat! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when
betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick--quick.
JULIE."

Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother
was right--he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see
how Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly,
"Don't trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want
of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura--but, alas! I dare not
hope. Give me my tisane."

When the doctor called next day, he looked grave, and, drawing Madame
Rameau into the next room, he said, "We are not getting on so well as
I had hoped; the fever is gone, but there is much to apprehend from the
debility left behind. His spirits are sadly depressed." Then added the
doctor, pleasantly, and with that wonderful insight into our complex
humanity in which physicians excel poets, and in which Parisian
physicians are not excelled by any physicians in the world: "Can't you
think of any bit of good news--that 'M. Thiers raves about your son's
last poem! that 'it is a question among the Academicians between him and
Jules Janin'--or that 'the beautiful Duchesse de ------- has been placed
in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young
Red Republican whose name begins with R.'--can't you think of any bit of
similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state
of your dear boy's amour propre, compared to which all the drugs in the
Pharmacopoeia are moonshine and water; and meanwhile be sure to remove
him to your own house, and out of the reach of his giddy young friends,
as soon as you possibly can."

When that great authority thus left his patient's case in the hands of
the mother, she said, "The boy shall be saved."