Little white hands
with the blue veins, little white hands to whom I had affianced my lips,
have you too received my last kiss?"

And Rodolphe, in delirious intoxication, plunged his head amongst the
pillows, still impregnated with the perfume of his love's hair. From the
depth of the alcove he seemed to see emerge the ghosts of the sweet
nights he had passed with his young mistress. He heard clear and
sonorous, amidst the nocturnal silence, the open-hearted laugh of
Mademoiselle Mimi, and he thought of the charming and contagious gaiety
with which she had been able so many times to make him forget all the
troubles and all the hardships of their hazardous existence.

Throughout the night he kept passing in review the eight months that he
had just spent with this girl, who had never loved him perhaps, but
whose tender lies had restored to Rodolphe's heart its youth and
virility.

Dawn surprised him at the moment when, conquered by fatigue, he had just
closed his eyes, red from the tears shed during the night. A doleful and
terrible vigil, yet such a one as even the most sneering and sceptical
amongst us may find in the depths of their past.

When his friends called on him in the morning they were alarmed at the
sight of Rodolphe, whose face bore the traces of all the anguish that
had awaited him during his vigil in the Gethsemane of love.

"Good!" said Marcel, "I was sure of it; it is his mirth of yesterday
that has turned in his heart. Things must not go on like this."

And in concert with two or three comrades he began a series of privately
indiscreet revelations respecting Mademoiselle Mimi, every word of which
pierced like a thorn in Rodolphe's heart. His friends "proved" to him
that all the time his mistress had tricked him like a simpleton at home
and abroad, and that this fair creature, pale as the angel of phthisis,
was a casket filled with evil sentiments and ferocious instincts.

One and another they thus took it in turns at the task they had set
themselves, which was to bring Rodolphe to that point at which soured
love turns to contempt; but this object was only half attained. The
poet's despair turned to wrath. He threw himself in a rage upon the
packages which he had done up the day before, and after having put on
one side all the objects that his mistress had in her possession when
she came to him, kept all those he had given her during their union,
that is to say, by far the greater number, and, abo