But the tavern was closing and they had to leave.
Jean felt so giddy in the open air he could not tell
how he had come to lose Monsieur Tudesco, after emptying
the contents of his purse into the latter’s
hand.
He wandered about all night in the rain, stumbling
through the puddles which splashed up the mud in his
face. His brains buzzed with the maddest schemes,
that took shape, jostled one another, and tumbled
to pieces in his head. Sometimes he would stop
to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then start off
again on his wild way. Fatigue calmed his nerves,
and a clear purpose emerged. He went straight
to the house where the actress lived, and from the
street gazed up at her dark, shuttered windows; then,
stepping up to the porte-cochere, he kissed
the great doors.
Dating from that night Jean Servien spent his days
in translating Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity
of pains. The task having taught him something
of verse-making, he composed an ode, which he sent
by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in
tears of blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as
a schoolboy’s exercise. Still, he did get
something said of the fair vision of a woman that
hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he
had kissed in a night of frenzy.
Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his son
had grown heedless, absent-minded, and hollow-eyed,
coming back late at night, and hardly up before noon.
Before the mute reproach in his father’s eyes
the boy hung his head. But his home-life was
nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, hovering
around the unknown, in regions he pictured as resplendent
with poetry, wealth and pleasure.
Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet the
Marquis Tudesco again. He had found it impossible
to replace his waistcoat of ticking. Moreover,
he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to shop-girls.
When the summer came, the theatrical posters announced
in quick succession Mithridate, Adrienne Lecouvreur,
Rodogune, les Enfants d’Edouard, la Fiammina.
Jean, having secured the money to pay for a seat by
hook or by crook, by some bit of trickery or falsehood,
by cajoling his aunt or by a surreptitious raid on
the cash-box, would watch from an orchestra stall the
startling metamorphoses of the woman he loved.
He saw her now girt with the white fillet of the virgins
of Hellas, like those figures carved with such an
exquisite purity in the marble of the Greek bas-reliefs
that they seem clad in inviolate innocence, now in
a flowered gown, with powdered ringlets sweeping her
naked shoulders, that had an inexpressible charm in
their spare outlines suggestive of the bitter-sweet
taste of an unripe fruit. She reminded him in
this attire of some old-time pastel of gallant ladies
such as the bookbinder’s son had pored over
in the dealers’ shops on the Quai Voltaire.
Anon she would be crowned with a hawk’s crest,
