Seraphine. "Oh!"
she continued, "this will teach me to show kindness. If only that brute
of a Leon had the sense to drop in now!"

Leon was the gentleman whose love carried a whip.

Rodolphe ran home without waiting to take breath. Going upstairs he
found his carroty-haired cat giving vent to piteous mewings. For two
nights already it has thus been vainly summoning its faithless love, an
agora Manon Lescaut, who had started on a campaign of gallantry on the
house-tops adjacent.

"Poor beast," said Rodolphe, "you have been deceived. Your Mimi has
jilted you like mine has jilted me. Bah! Let us console ourselves. You
see, my poor fellow, the hearts of women and she-cats are abysses that
neither men nor toms will ever fathom."

When he entered his room, although it was fearfully hot, Rodolphe seemed
to feel a cloak of ice about his shoulders. It was the chill of
solitude, that terrible nocturnal solitude that nothing disturbs. He lit
his candle and then perceived the ravaged room. The gaping drawers in
the furniture showed empty, and from floor to ceiling sadness filled the
little room that seemed to Rodolphe vaster than a desert. Stepping
forward he struck his foot against the parcels containing the things
belonging to Mademoiselle Mimi, and he felt an impulse of joy to find
that she had not yet come to fetch them as she had told him in the
morning she would do. Rodolphe felt that, despite all his struggles, the
moment of reaction was at hand, and readily divined that a cruel night
was to expiate all the bitter mirth that he had dispensed in the course
of the evening. However, he hoped that his body, worn out with fatigue,
would sink to sleep before the reawakening of the sorrows so long pent
back in his heart.

As he approached the couch, and on drawing back the curtains saw the bed
that had not been disturbed for two days, the pillows placed side by
side, beneath one of which still peeped out the trimming of a woman's
night cap, Rodolphe felt his heart gripped in the pitiless vice of that
desolate grief that cannot burst forth. He fell at the foot of the bed,
buried his face in his hands, and, after having cast a glance round the
desolate room, exclaimed:

"Oh! Little Mimi, joy of my home, is it really true that you are gone,
that I have driven you away, and that I shall never see you again, my
God. Oh! Pretty brown curly head that has slept so long on this spot,
will you never come back to sleep here again? Oh!