sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees dappling
with shade the leafy footways, the white fountain-spray and flaming
flower-beds of the Rond Point, the flashing flickering stream of
carriages flowing to the Bois with their freight of beauty and wealth
and insolent vice.

"The first time I looked out of that window," he said, "I seemed to
myself like Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy, when once again he
beheld the stars. You cannot know what I felt when after so many years
I saw the world again for the first time, with half an eye, for ever
so little a space. I had my wife's opera-glass in my hand, and I saw
with inexpressible pleasure a young vagrant vendor of pastry offering
his goods to two ladies in crinolines, with a small dog. I closed the
glass; I could see no more, for I envied the dog. The nurse carried
me back to bed and gave me morphia. That day I looked no more. For me
the Divine Comedy was far from ended. The divine humorist has even
descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's coffin. I lie between the two
Champs-Elysees, the one where warm life palpitates, and that other,
where the pale ghosts flit."

Then it was not a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood
that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven."
Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of
humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated
divinity"? But his amusement thereat had been genial. "Like a mad
harlequin," he had written of Byron, the man to whom he felt himself
most related, "he strikes a dagger into his own heart, to sprinkle
mockingly with the jetting black blood the ladies and gentlemen
around.... My blood is not so splenetically black; my bitterness comes
only from the gall-apples of my ink." But now, she thought, that
bitter draught always at his lips had worked into his blood at last.

"Are you quite incurable?" she said gently, as she returned from the
window to seat herself at his mattress graveside.

"No, I shall die some day. Gruby says very soon. But doctors are so
inconsistent. Last week, after I had had a frightful attack of cramp
in the throat and chest, '_Pouvez-vous siffler?_' he said. '_Non, pas
meme une comedie de M. Scribe_,' I replied. So you may see how bad I
was. Well, even that, he said, wouldn't hasten the end, and I should
go on living indefinitely! I had to caution him not to tell my wife.
Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And