“Yes!--the river had fondled her!--had stroked her cheeks and left them pale and pure,--had kissed her lips and closed them in a childlike, happy smile,--had swept all her soft hair back from the smooth white brow just to show how prettily the blue veins were penciled under the soft transparent skin,--had closed the gentle eyes and deftly pointed the long dark lashes in a downward sleepy fringe,--and had made of one little dead girl so wondrous and piteous a picture, that otherwise hard-hearted women sobbed at sight of it, and strong men turned away with hushed footsteps and moistened eyes.”
And that, practically, is the end of the story, for Gaston Beauvais, having revenged himself on his sweetheart and her betrayer, has nought to do now save drink absinthe. _Delirium tremens_ ensues, Beauvais is laid up for a month, and at the end of that period the doctor speaks plain words of wisdom and warning to him:
“You must give it up,” he said decisively, “at once,--and forever. It is a detestable habit,--a horrible craze of the Parisians, who are positively deteriorating in blood and brain by reason of their passion for this poison. What the next generation will be, I dread to think! I know it is a difficult business to break off anything to which the system has grown accustomed,--but you are still a young man, and you cannot be too strongly warned against the danger of continuing in your present course of life. Moral force is necessary,--and you must exert it. I have a large medical practice, and cases like yours are alarmingly common, and as much on the increase as morphinomania amongst women; but I tell you frankly, no medicine can do good where the patient refuses to employ his own power of resistance. I must ask you, therefore, for your own sake, to bring all your will to bear on the effort to overcome this fatal habit of yours, as a matter of duty and conscience.”
But the physician’s admonition falls on heedless ears. Beauvais returns to the alluring glass, and the book ends with the confession that he is a confirmed _absintheur_--“a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou!--a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the daytime, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm!”