a common
soldier at that moment for money. He walked on with a slouching,
feverish gait known to all the unhappy, reached Camille Maupin's house,
entered, careless of his disordered dress, and sent in a message. He
entreated Mlle. des Touches to see him for a moment.

"Mademoiselle only went to bed at three o'clock this morning," said the
servant, "and no one would dare to disturb her until she rings."

"When does she ring?"

"Never before ten o'clock."

Then Lucien wrote one of those harrowing appeals in which the
well-dressed beggar flings all pride and self-respect to the winds. One
evening, not so very long ago, when Lousteau had told him of the abject
begging letters which Finot received, Lucien had thought it impossible
that any creature would sink so low; and now, carried away by his pen,
he had gone further, it may be, than other unlucky wretches upon the
same road. He did not suspect, in his fever and imbecility, that he
had just written a masterpiece of pathos. On his way home along the
Boulevards, he met Barbet.

"Barbet!" he begged, holding out his hand. "Five hundred francs!"

"No. Two hundred," returned the other.

"Ah! then you have a heart."

"Yes; but I am a man of business as well. I have lost a lot of money
through you," he concluded, after giving the history of the failure of
Fendant and Cavalier, "will you put me in the way of making some?"

Lucien quivered.

"You are a poet. You ought to understand all kinds of poetry," continued
the little publisher. "I want a few rollicking songs at this moment to
put along with some more by different authors, or they will be down upon
me over the copyright. I want to have a good collection to sell on the
streets at ten sous. If you care to let me have ten good drinking-songs
by to-morrow morning, or something spicy,--you know the sort of thing,
eh!--I will pay you two hundred francs."

When Lucien returned home, he found Coralie stretched out straight and
stiff on a pallet-bed; Berenice, with many tears, had wrapped her in a
coarse linen sheet, and put lighted candles at the four corners of the
bed. Coralie's face had taken that strange, delicate beauty of death
which so vividly impresses the living with the idea of absolute calm;
she looked like some white girl in a decline; it seemed as if those
pale, crimson lips must open and murmur the name which had blended with
the name of God in the last words that she uttered before she died.

Lucien told