me occasion to discourage the young
literary aspirants who bring their manuscripts to you--always a
praiseworthy action. Yes, I have been successful. Yes, I have been paid
a franc a line. Yes, I have made money, and there in that drawer are a
certain number of yellow, green, and red papers from which a bit is
clipped every six months, and which represent three or four thousand
francs of income. It is rare in our profession, and to gain that poor
hoard I have been obliged--I, a poet--to imitate the unsociable virtues
of a bourgeois, know how to deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my
daughter. At last I have that money. And I often said to myself, if I
should die their bread is assured, and here is a little marriage portion
for Helen! And I was content--I was proud!--for I know them, the stories
of our widows and our orphans, the fourpenny help of the government, the
tobacco shops for six hundred francs in the province, and, if the
daughter is intelligent and pretty like mine, the dramatic author, an
old friend of the father, who advises her to enter the Conservatoire,
and who makes of her--mercy of God! that shall never be. But for all
that, my boy, it is necessary that I should not linger. Sickness is
expensive, and already it has been necessary to sell one or two bonds
from that drawer. To seek the sunlight, as you suggest, to bask like a
lizard at Cannes or at Menton, one more bond must go, and there would
not be enough to last to the end, if I should wait for seven or eight
years more, now that I can no longer write. Happily, there is nothing to
fear. But what I have suffered since I have been incapable of writing,
and have felt my hoard of gold shrink and diminish in my hand like the
Magic Skin of Balzac, is frightful. Now you understand me, do you not?
and you will no longer bid me take care of myself. No; if you still pray
to God, ask him to send me speedily to the undertaker's."

* * * * *

Fifteen days later some thirty of us followed the hearse which carried
Louis Miraz to the Cemetery Montmartre. It had snowed the day before,
and Doctor Arnould, the old frequenter of painters' studios, the friend
and physician of the dead man, walking behind me, called in his brusque
voice,

"Very commonplace, but always terrible the contrast: a burial in the
snow--black on white. The Funeral of the Poor, by the late Vigneron,
isn't to be ridiculed. Brr!"

At last we came to the edge of the g