g that Rodolphe had
only taken her to help him forget the absent, whom she made him on the
contrary regret, for his old love had never been so noisy and so lively
in his heart.

One day Juliet, Rodolphe's new mistress, was talking about her lover,
the poet, with a medical student who was courting her. The student
replied,--

"My dear child, that fellow only makes use of you as they use nitrate to
cauterize wounds. He wants to cauterize his heart and nerve. You are
very wrong to bother yourself about being faithful to him."

"Ah, ah!" cried the girl, breaking into a laugh. "Do you really think
that I put myself out about him?"

And that very evening she gave the student a proof to the contrary.

Thanks to the indiscretion of one of those officious friends who are
unable to retain unpublished news capable of vexing you, Rodolphe soon
got wind of the matter, and made it a pretext for breaking off with his
temporary mistress.

He then shut himself up in positive solitude, in which all the
flitter-mice of _ennui_ soon came and nested, and he called work to his
aid but in vain. Every evening, after wasting as much perspiration over
the job as he did in ink, he produced a score of lines in which some old
idea, as worn out as the Wandering Jew, and vilely clad in rags cribbed
from the literary dust heap, danced clumsily on the tight rope of
paradox. On reading through these lines Rodolphe was as bewildered as a
man who sees nettles spring up in a bed in which he thought he had
planted roses. He would then tear up the paper, on which he had just
scattered this chaplet of absurdities, and trample it under foot in a
rage.

"Come," said he, striking himself on the chest just above the heart,
"the cord is broken, there is nothing but to resign ourselves to it."

And as for some time past a like failure followed all his attempts at
work, he was seized with one of those fits of depression which shake the
most stubborn pride and cloud the most lucid intellects. Nothing is
indeed more terrible than these hidden struggles that sometimes take
place between the self-willed artist and his rebellious art. Nothing is
more moving than these fits of rage alternating with invocation, in turn
supplicating or imperative, addressed to a disdainful or fugitive muse.

The most violent human anguish, the deepest wounds to the quick of the
heart, do not cause suffering approaching that which one feels in these
hours of doubt and impatience,