CHAPTER X.

'LA JEUNE FRANCE.'

If this were not a veracious history, in the customary order of events as they occur in the construction of fiction, the reader should have gone straight from the quick and gracious acceptance of O'Hoolohan's proposal of marriage to the old-fashioned formula of ringing the wedding-bells, and leaving the united pair to the enjoyment of the honeymoon, with the tag: 'If they don't live happy, may we!' That would be the artistic conclusion. But we are copying from nature, and have no pretensions to art. And O'Hoolohan's nature was one of surprises. That phenomenally-constituted being had been very busy secretly prosecuting researches into the manner in which the girl he had recognised in the Morgue had come by her death, and the mode in which her body had been disposed of.

A great city like Paris, with its never-ending rush of activities, is like to a whirlpool. It is always in surging motion; the figures that rise to the surface for awhile and attract a passing notice as they circle giddily round are thought no more of, when they sink from view, than the flotsam and jetsam sucked into the oblivion of the Maelström.

Marguerite (for it was she) had run her course, and nine days after she had disappeared from the haunts that knew her she was forgotten. How she had died was never ascertained; but there was narrow scope for conjecture. It was only too evident that she had committed suicide. In the multitude of her facile acquaintances she had met one for whom she had conceived a real attachment. He pretended to reciprocate it, and he did, seemingly, until his student's career was finished, and he had received his doctor's degree, and was summoned to his home in the provinces to begin his dull professional life. The consecrated preliminary to that in France is to marry a neighbour's daughter with a snug dowry, who has been provided of long date by the prudence of family councils, tenacious of tradition. The youthful doctor duly led his destined help-meet to the altar, and by the same act consigned her erring sister in Paris, whose very existence she had never suspected, to the cold Seine and the nameless burial-pit.

That is no novelty in the Latin Quarter, nor will ever be while woman, degraded soever though she be, is not utterly heartless.

The deserted Marguerite _had_ committed suicide. She had sallied out in the blackness of midnight, when the quays were silent and lonely, and, watching her opportunity till the policemen and roysterers and rag-pickers were distant, she had stealthily clambered the parapet of a bridge and dropped into the river. That must have been the end. So it had been settled over pipes and cards and Strasburg beer in the _brasseries_ of the Boulevard St. Michel; and so, truly, it might--nay, must have been.

O'Hoolohan had learned this from a knot of premature cynics in the café of _la Jeune France_, where he had been in the habit of calling in among other gay resorts of the district to pick up what information he could on a matter that affected him much, for under his stone-like, soldierly exterior there were hidden springs of tenderness.

The café which is called after young France is much affected by those promising pillars of the future, the students of law and medicine, especially the latter, who reside in the Latin Quarter of Paris. A light, varied of blue and red, blazes like a pharos over its portals to entice the customers. It lies to the right a few hundred yards up the Boulevard St. Michel, as it is entered from the side of the quays. Here may be seen congregated, after dinner-hour in the evening--under the warm chandeliers in the winter, out in the fresh air of the thoroughfare in the finer season--the future Berryers and Lamballes of the most civilized nation in the world. Only they do not look like it always, carelessly chatting behind their modest glasses of beer, often from amid the clouds of incense floating from cheap cigars, or the equally economic _caporal_ tobacco. A gay and spacious café it is; well lit, well furnished with softly-padded cushions, and lined with rows of mirrors reflecting the intellectual group around busily engaged wasting the hours in everything but the study of comparative anatomy or the subtleties of the Code Napoleon. Dominoes and picquet are more in vogue than jurisprudence, and the only books which are read by the novices of the learned professions who frequent the place are woman's looks, and folly--the loss of time and money--invariably all they teach them.

The night before that on which O'Hoolohan paid his last visit to O'Hara's chambers, the soldier of fortune had sauntered into the café early, but it was almost deserted. It was the _mi-carême_, that oasis in mid-Lent for the Paris student, when he avenges himself for the enforced abstinence from his usual enjoyments by the indulgence in riot in the interval of saturnalia allowed by custom. The habitués of the Young France were not there. They were dancing merrily in one disguise or other at the ball-room higher up in the same boulevard, the Closerie des Lilas.

Why, it may be asked, did not O'Hoolohan go to the ball-room where he had first seen her whose fate he was inquiring into? and why, knowing that she was dead, did he seek to know more?

The one answer may serve for both questions. He looked upon himself already as a member of Captain Chauvin's household. He would not dishonour her he loved by showing himself in any of the notorious haunts of loose womankind now that he was her accepted suitor. But having come to the inevitable conclusion that Marguerite was the lost sister of Berthe's friend, Caroline, he was anxious to obtain some memorial of her, and, if possible, to rescue her remains from the _fosse commune_, and put over them a simple tomb. He was emotional, was this battered campaigner, who had buffeted about the world so much, and had an infinite pity for human weakness--and chiefly for the weaknesses of maidenhood beset by temptation. He hung about the café until groups returning from the Closerie in every variety of carnivalesque costume had filled it with a noisy company. Close to the table at which he sat, three students, disciples of Æsculapius, from their conversation, took up their position and ordered a frugal supper before retiring to roost in their attics hard by. They were talkative, and talked as if they were not very particular who listened. Our friend could not help overhearing them, and out of their conversation had sprung the proposed 'affair of honour.'

'Ah, _ma Marguerite_,' said one pale-faced, blear-eyed stripling, as he rolled a cigarette, 'little I thought as I whirled you in a waltz a twelvemonth ago that I'd be having a hand in your dissection to-day. She makes a splendid subject.'

'The proud minx, she never would take my arm,' said a sentimental gentleman with blue spectacles. 'D'you know, Eugène, I cut enough of her hair off when I got the chance, two hours after they brought her in, to plait me a watch-guard. Garçon, a bock! Don't you think it a famous idea?'

'_Ma foi!_' said Eugène, a black-bearded fellow with a Gascon accent, robust of frame, and several years older than his companion, 'the idea is tolerable, but mine is better. I bought a member of Marguerite and took it home. _Tiens_, see this paper-knife,' producing one from his pocket. 'I thought I'd like a souvenir of _la modiste_ in memory of old times. This is made out of her tibia; I had the fibula removed. Please to observe the beautiful polish the internal malleolus takes!'

'Is that true?' exclaimed O'Hoolohan angrily, starting forward to the table.

'What business of yours is it?' retorted the Gascon.

'Is it true?'

'I have said it, Mr. Insolent.'

'Then you're a beast, d'you hear?'

'And you, sir, are an intermeddling hound!' shouted the Gascon, foaming at the mouth in a spasm of fury.

O'Hoolohan shut his lips firmly a moment, and clenched his hands as if struggling to suppress his wrath. Then, having apparently succeeded, he said quietly and deliberately, while a smile that was near akin to a sneer played about his lips:

'You are a braggart and a bully, like most Gascons, and it is my private opinion at present that you are a coward into the bargain.'

There was an immediate springing to the feet of all present, and a confused hubbub of voices, everyone speaking at once.

'Silence!' shouted the Gascon. 'This is my concern. You'll have to answer for this, sir. Here is my friend's address.'

'I'm at your service, and the sooner the better. Your friend will not have to wait long for a visit from a friend of mine.' And O'Hoolohan handed his adversary his card, and took the proffered address with a bow. Then, removing his hat with a sarcastic coolness, he saluted the company and left.

Idiots, you will say, my dear sir or madame, to pick up this quarrel on such foolish grounds! I admit it. But do not most quarrels rest on the basis of folly? and are not most disputants idiots? So it has been, and so will it be to the crack of doom.

The three students were right in one point, however. Marguerite did not even tenant a grave in the paupers' corner of a cemetery. Her body was not claimed; in the darkness it had been bundled in a sack, and trotted to the Ecole Pratique in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, there to contribute to the enlightenment of the rising generation of surgeons. From the slab in the Morgue to the slab in the dissecting-room! Gruesome journey and grim destiny!