“Some time afterwards, when there was to be
a special display for the officers, seeing Nelly d’Argine
there in a box surrounded by her usual admirers, appearing
indifferent to everything that was going on, and not
even apparently noticing that he was performing, and
was being heartily applauded, he threw his trapeze
forward as far as he could, at the end of his performance,
and exerting all his strength, and certain that he
should fall beyond the protecting net, he flung himself
furiously into space.
“A cry of horror resounded from one end of the
house to the other, when he was picked up disfigured,
and with nearly every bone in his body broken.
The unfortunate young fellow was no longer breathing,
his chest was crushed in, and blood-stained froth
was issuing from his lips, and Nelly d’Argine
made haste to leave the house with her friends, saying
in a very vexed voice:
“’It is very disgusting to come in the
hopes of being amused, and to witness an accident!’
“And Mamma Stirling, who was ruined and
in utter despair, and who cared for nothing more in
this world, after that took to drinking, used to get
constantly drunk, and rolled from public-house to public-house,
and bar to bar, and as the worst glass of vitrol still
cost a penny, he became reduced to undertaking the
part which you have seen, to dabble in the water,
to blacken himself, and to allow himself to be bitten.
“Ah! What a wretched thing life is for
those who are kind, and who have too much heart!”
“When I saw her for the first time,” Louis
d’Arandel said, with the look of a man who was
dreaming and trying to recollect something, “I
thought of some slow and yet passionate music that
I once heard, though I do not remember who was the
composer, where there was a fair-haired woman, whose
hair was so silky, so golden, and so vibrating, that
her lover had it cut off after her death, and had
the strings of the magic bow of a violin made out
of it, which afterwards emitted such superhuman complaints
and love melodies that they made its hearers love until
death.
“In her eyes there lay the mystery of deep waters,
and one was lost in them, drowned in them like in
fathomless depths, and at the corners of her mouth
there lurked that despotic and merciless smile of those
women who do not fear that they may be conquered,
who rule over men like cruel queens, whose hearts
remain as virgin as those of the strictest Carmelite
nuns, amidst a flood of lewdness.
“I have seen her angelic head, the bands of
her hair, that looked like plates of gold, her tall,
graceful figure, her white, slender, childish hands,
in stained glass windows in churches. She suggested
pictures of the Annunciation, where the Archangel
Gabriel descends with ultra-marine colored wings,
and Mary is sitting at her spinning-wheel and spinning,
while uttering pious prayers, and looks like the tall
sister of the white lilies that are growing beside
her and the roses.
