“Au revoir, n’est-ce pas? a Charing Cross, n’est-ce-pas, Monsieur?  Vous ne m’oublierez pas?...”

As we turned to walk along the boulevard I noticed that the boy, too, had disappeared.  The moonlight was playing with the leaves and boughs of the plane trees and throwing them in Japanese shadow-pictures on the pavement:  I was given over to thought; evidently Oscar imagined I was offended, for he launched out into a panegyric on Paris.

“The most wonderful city in the world, the only civilised capital; the only place on earth where you find absolute toleration for all human frailties, with passionate admiration for all human virtues and capacities.

“Do you remember Verlaine, Frank?  His life was nameless and terrible, he did everything to excess, was drunken, dirty and debauched, and yet there he would sit in a cafe on the Boul’ Mich’, and everybody who came in would bow to him, and call him maitre and be proud of any sign of recognition from him because he was a great poet.

“In England they would have murdered Verlaine, and men who call themselves gentlemen would have gone out of their way to insult him in public.  England is still only half-civilised; Englishmen touch life at one or two points without suspecting its complexity.  They are rude and harsh.”

All the while I could not help thinking of Dante and his condemnation of Florence, and its “hard, malignant people,” the people who still had something in them of “the mountain and rock” of their birthplace:—­“E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno.”

“You are not offended, Frank, are you, with me, for making you meet two caryatides of the Parisian temple of pleasure?”

“No, no,” I cried, “I was thinking how Dante condemned Florence and its people, its ungrateful malignant people, and how when his teacher, Brunetto Latini, and his companions came to him in the underworld, he felt as if he, too, must throw himself into the pit with them.  Nothing prevented him from carrying out his good intention (buona voglia) except the fear of being himself burned and baked as they were.  I was just thinking that it was his great love for Latini which gave him the deathless words: 

    ...  “Non dispetto, ma doglia
    La vostra condizion dentro mi fisse.

“Not contempt but sorrow....”

“Oh, Frank,” cried Oscar, “what a beautiful incident!  I remember it all.  I read it this last winter in Naples....  Of course Dante was full of pity as are all great poets, for they know the weakness of human nature.”

But even “the sorrow” of which Dante spoke seemed to carry with it some hint of condemnation; for after a pause he went on: 

“You must not judge me, Frank:  you don’t know what I have suffered.  No wonder I snatch now at enjoyment with both hands.  They did terrible things to me.  Did you know that when I was arrested the police let the reporters come to the cell and stare at me.  Think of it—­the degradation and the shame—­as if I had been a monster on show.  Oh! you knew!  Then you know, too, how I was really condemned before I was tried; and what a farce my trial was.  That terrible judge with his insults to those he was sorry he could not send to the scaffold.