A LOVE CRIME. Paul Bourget

like the rest.

      Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always

      been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or

      seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school

      paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals

      of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon

      pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened

      on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He

      took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in

      them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature

      misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous

      analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent

      languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or

      ideal.

      The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of

      the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without

      declamation.

      The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull,

      dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with

      the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy

      torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her

      entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.

      "PARIS, _May_ 1871.

      "Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock,

      that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe

      have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and

      will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly

      drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken

      millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent

      the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations

      writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay,

      with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous

      paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our

      professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson

      turned upon progress!

      "We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters

      comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the

      Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the

      federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with

      great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long

      way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday,

      at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you

      are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news.

      The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of

      the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less

      violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils

      fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master.

      Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking

      together in a corner.

      "In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the

      bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had

      neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be

      something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what?

      Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.'

      For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of

      the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I

      have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to

      his house.

      "Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The

      Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of

      ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet,

      he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of

      the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it

      would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going

      to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present

      fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then

      furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same

      usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure

      of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns

      of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in

      frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had

      not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots,

      with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we

      are saved.

      "All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of

      our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the

      leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of

      contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal

      soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my

      eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead

      lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with

      battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by

      blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky

      beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the

      distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping

      like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter.

      _Homo homini lupior lupis._"

      "DIEPPE, _July_ 1874.

      "The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and

      already