’Oh!  Schumann, typical of despair, the voluptuousness of despair!  Yes, the end of everything, the last song of saddened purity hovering above the ruins of the world!  Oh!  Wagner, the god in whom centuries of music are incarnated!  His work is the immense ark, all the arts blended in one; the real humanity of the personages at last expressed, the orchestra itself living apart the life of the drama.  And what a massacre of conventionality, of inept formulas! what a revolutionary emancipation amid the infinite!  The overture of “Tannhauser,” ah! that’s the sublime hallelujah of the new era.  First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the wings of a triumphal hymn!’

‘I am going to shut up, sir,’ repeated the waiter.

Claude, who no longer listened, he also being absorbed in his own passion, emptied his glass of beer and cried:  ’Eh, old man, they are going to shut up.’

Then Gagniere trembled.  A painful twitch came over his ecstatic face, and he shivered as if he had dropped from the stars.  He gulped down his beer, and once on the pavement outside, after pressing his companion’s hand in silence, he walked off into the gloom.

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Claude returned to the Rue de Douai.  During the week that he had been scouring Paris anew, he had each time brought back with him the feverish excitement of the day.  But he had never before returned so late, with his brain so hot and smoky.  Christine, overcome with fatigue, was asleep under the lamp, which had gone out, her brow resting on the edge of the table.

VIII

AT last Christine gave a final stroke with her feather-broom, and they were settled.  The studio in the Rue de Douai, small and inconvenient, had only one little room, and a kitchen, as big as a cupboard, attached to it.  They were obliged to take their meals in the studio; they had to live in it, with the child always tumbling about their legs.  And Christine had a deal of trouble in making their few sticks suffice, as she wished to do, in order to save expense.  After all, she was obliged to buy a second-hand bedstead; and yielded to the temptation of having some white muslin curtains, which cost her seven sous the metre.  The den then seemed charming to her, and she began to keep it scrupulously clean, resolving to do everything herself, and to dispense with a servant, as living would be a difficult matter.