My Love,
my Life!
She did not answer. He staggered to his feet. As he rose, his
eyes fell on the pan of burning charcoal. A terrible suspicion
flashed across his mind. This giddiness,--this nausea. The
ignorance of the barbarian. This silence. O merciful heavens! she
was dying!
He crawled toward her. He touched her. She fell forward with a
lifeless sound upon the floor. He uttered a piercing shriek, and
threw himself beside her.
* * * * *
A file of gendarmes, accompanied by the Chef Burke, found him the
next morning lying lifeless upon the floor. They laughed
brutally,--these cruel minions of the law,--and disengaged his arm
from the waist of the wooden dummy which they had come to reclaim
for the mantuamaker.
Emptying a few bucketfuls of water over his form, they finally
succeeded in robbing him, not only of his mistress, but of that
Death he had coveted without her.
Ah! we live in a strange world, Messieurs.
FANTINE.
AFTER THE FRENCH OF VICTOR HUGO.
PROLOGUE.
As long as there shall exist three paradoxes, a moral Frenchman, a
religious Atheist, and a believing sceptic; so long, in fact, as
booksellers shall wait--say twenty-five years--for a new gospel; so
long as paper shall remain cheap and ink three sous a bottle, I
have no hesitation in saying that such books as these are not
utterly profitless.
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