It is proverbially on the next morning that a man’s wound begins to hurt. For the others, since I’ve seen none of them, I can speak only by inference: in the morning our little cénacle scatters to the four corners of the town, not to be reunited till the hour of dinner; but what reason is there to doubt that the day will have treated them very much as it has treated me? And oh, the weary, dreary, bright spring day it is! The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest, with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting feminine bonnets; and the sky overhead is one smooth blue vault, and the sun is everywhere, a fume of gold: but the sparkle and the joyousness of it all are gone. Turn where I will, I find the same awful sense of emptiness. The streets are deserted, in spite of the crowds: I can hear my solitary footsteps echo gruesomely through them. Paris is like Pompeii.
After luncheon, thinking to obtain relief by fleeing the Quarter (where every blessed stick and stone has its bitter-sweet association with her), I crossed the river, mixed with the throng in the Boulevard, sat for a while at the Café de la Paix. But things were no whit better. The sun shone with the same cheerless brilliancy; the air touched one with the same light, uncomforting caress; the laughter of the wayfarers had the same hollow ring. A blight had fallen upon man and nature. I came back to the Rue Racine, and its ghosts of her.
That exclamation of Smith’s last night, to which we all cried taboo, really hit one of the salient points of the position: when I think of the way we treated her in the beginning! Extenuating circumstances might be pleaded for us, no doubt. It was only natural that we should have treated her so, if tradition and convention can make a thing natural—if it is natural that men should glare at a woman in a smoking-carriage, for example. And besides, she has had her revenge. For that matter, she was never conscious of our offences; but she has had her revenge, if to see us one by one prostrate ourselves at her feet, humble adorers, eager servitors,—if that may constitute revenge. And then, we are told, though our sins be as red as scarlet, if we do truly repent, they shall be washed as white as snow: and we have repented, goodness knows how truly. All the same, forgiveness without forgetfulness being but the guinea-stamp without the gold, I wish I could forget the way we treated her in the beginning.