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How much have I been afflicted that I was not able to obtain a favourable answer to all the petitions which were addressed to me. That good Madame de Monteason came from Romainville to St. Cloud to solicit the pardon of MM. de Riviere and de Polignac; we succeeded in gaining an audience for Madame de Polignac; . . . how beautiful she is!
The carriage-wheels splashed mud over them, but they did not move. I was standing on the front seat of an open carriage; from time to time a man in rags would step out from the wall, hurl a torrent of abuse at us, then cover us with a cloud of flour. Mud would soon follow; yet we kept on our way toward the Isle of Love and the pretty wood of Romainville, consecrated by so many sweet kisses.
And the husband would go out, saunter along the boulevard by the shops, wait for the omnibus, and pass half the day in procuring two cakes, worth three sous, which he would bring home in triumph, wiping his forehead. M. Chebe adored the summer, the Sundays, the great footraces in the dust at Clamart or Romainville, the excitement of holidays and the crowd.
Oh! misery! the young man who ought to love her, whom she loved, who used to take her to the woods of Verrieres and Romainville, to the dances on the lawn, to the suppers under the trees; he who used to talk with her as she sat near the lamp in the rear of the shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust of bread moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once sublime and poor; he, that same man, after abandoning her, finds her after a night of orgy, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution in her heart.
He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April. He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly. He walked like a little child who is permitted to toddle alone. At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover the mastery of his mind.
The torment from which he had escaped with so much difficulty was unchained afresh within him. His ideas began to grow confused once more; they assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair. The name of Romainville recurred incessantly to his mind, with the two verses of a song which he had heard in the past.
The Marquis de L had a charming villa at Romainville, near Paris, to which, on Sundays, he invited not only those gentlemen who were the most prodigal patrons of his salon, but a number of ladies, who were dancers and singers conspicuous at the opera; forming a society of the strangest character, the male portion of which were bent on losing their money, whilst the ladies were determined to get rid of whatever virtue they might still have left.
Every evening he plays dominoes, like any bourgeois, in a cafe near the Prefecture, and Sundays he goes out to a little box of a place he has bought near the forest of Romainville, in the Saint-Gervais meadows; there he cultivates blue dahlias, and talked, last year, of crowning a Rosiere. All that, my dear colonel, is too bucolic to allow of my employing him on any political police-work."
It is said that the Mazas prison is burnt to ashes, and fears are entertained for the safety of the Archbishop, who was incarcerated there. It is reported that considerable bodies of Insurgents attempted to escape from Paris in the direction of Aubervilliers and Romainville, but they were driven back.
How much have I been afflicted that I was not able to obtain a favourable answer to all the petitions which were addressed to me. That good Madame de Monteason came from Romainville to St. Cloud to solicit the pardon of MM. de Riviere and de Polignac; we succeeded in gaining an audience for Madame de Polignac; . . . how beautiful she is!
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