There were also other tender hands to watch over his youth. His cousin Eliza, who died early, is a figure so mild and transparent and of so light a tread that she appears like one of Jacobsen's wonderful creations who wander and speak like disembodied souls. She had the unique beauty of early illness, and on that account perhaps turned more toward the absorbed but not melancholy child, excusing his escapades. She was loved tenderly, with a child's love that was without desire and danger.
"Certes oui pauvre maman était Bien, trop bonne, et mon coeur à la voir palpitait, Tressautait, et riait et pleurait de l'entendre Mais toi, je t'aimais autrement non pas plus tendre Plus familier, voilà."
It was she too who staged his last youthful folly by giving him the money for printing the _Poèmes Saturniens_. Like a white flame her figure shines through the dense stifling fumes of his life. It is as if the soft tread of these two women had given many of his verses their seraphic sheen and lent the mother-of-pearl opalescence to his softest poems, in which there is a secret rustling as of the folds of women's gowns. Even the Paul Verlaine of the later years, "the ruin insufficiently ruined," who saw in woman the most ferocious enemy, and who fled to the wolves that they might protect him from "woman their sister," even he still dreamed of the folded hands, of the forgiving innocent gesture of the earliest memories. This yearning for mild and pure women has found many incarnations. In the poems to his bride, Mathilde Manté, it is the tender song of the troubadour; in the hours of his mystical conversion it becomes a tender prayer and Madonna cult; in the years of his decadence it appears as a pathetic echo, a stumbling plaint and dreamy childhood desires--the precious hour between sin and sin. Sometimes this secret desire is placed tenderly and simply into lines of verse as into a rare, fragrant shrine where the dearest possessions are kept. These are pure, wonderful lines like the following, full of longing and renunciation:
"Je voudrais, si ma vie était encore à faire, Qu'une femme très calme habitât avec moi."
Verlaine soon left these mirror-clear days of beautiful youth. His father decided to put him into a boarding-school at Paris. The dreamy little boy, looking toward the gay school cap, gladly assented. This was the turning point. Here his life in a way was rent in two parts, and a wide gap appears in the weakly but not morbid character of the child. The somewhat spoiled, modest, and confiding boy is put among students who are already dissolute and overbearing. On the very first day he is sickened by the coldness and barrenness of the rooms, and frightened by the first contact with life he is instinctively afraid of the evil which was to overtake him after all. Filled with that mighty longing for tenderness and gentle shelter which even at fifty he did not lose, he fled to his home in tears. He was greeted there with cries of joy and embraces, but on the next morning he was taken back with gentle force.
