FOLLE-FAHIim
Cl
down, and who would so willingly have slept forever
with any night they laid their heads upon their sacks
of rags. But, so long as they woke at all, they needed
to wake with the first note of the sparrows in the dark.
She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of
day were seen, roused scores of them; and in pay-
ment they gave her the right to warm herself at their
stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of their
crust, a little copper pieceanything that they could
afford or she would consent to take. A woman, who
had been the rveilleuse of the quarter many years,
had diedj and they were glad of her: "Her eyes have
bo sleep m them," they said; and they found that she
ever failed.
It was a strange tradeto rise whilst yet for the
world it was night, and go to and fro the dreary courts,
up and down the gloom of the staircases, and in and
out the silent chambers, and call all those sons and
daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that
their lives knew. So often she felt so loth to wake
them; so often she stood beside the bundle of straw on
which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in
her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the
heart rudely to shatter those mercies of the night.
It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all
those sleepers in the stillness that came before the
dawn, and move from house to house, from door to
door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her
lamp alone burning.
They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel
than murder only to call them from their rest to work,
and keep alive in them that faculty of suffering which
was all they gained from their humanity.
Her pity for them grew so great that her heart per-
force softened to them also. Those strong men gaunt
with famine, those white women with their starved
Children on their breasts, those young maidens worn
blind over the needle or the potter's clay, those little
children who staggered up in the dark to go to the fur-
nace, or the wheel, or the powder mill, or the potato-
fields outside the wallsshe could neither fear nor hate
them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb,
passionate, wondering grief.
She saw these people depised for no shame, wretched
for no sin, suffering eternally, though guilty of no other
fault than that of being in too large numbers on an
earth too small for the enormous burden of its endless
woe. She found that she had companions in her misery,
and that she was not alone under that bitter scorn
which had been poured on her. In a manner she grew
to care for these human creatures, all strangers, yet
whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused.
It was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew
her from the despair that had closed around her.
And some of these in turn loved her.
Neither poverty or wretchedness could dull the lus-
trous, deep-hued flowerlike beauty that was hers by
nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the
little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low,
entered the place where they slept, the men and the
children alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise
and things of sorcery.
" When she wakes us. the children never cry," said a
woman whom she always summoned an hour before
dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory.
It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see
the children smile because she, touched them. It lifted
a little the ice that had closed about her heart.
It had become the height of the summer. The burn-
ing days and the sultry nights poured down on her
\bare head and blinded her, and filled her throat with
the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth
with the thirst of overdriven cattle.
All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for
one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she lis-
tened for one voice.
She wandered all the day, half the night. They won-
dered that she woke so surely with every dawn; they
did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She
sought for him always; sought the busy crowds of the
living: sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
As she passed through the endless ways in the won-
drouscity; as she passed by the vast temples of art;
as she passed by the open doors of the sacred places
which the country had raised to the great memories
that it treasured; it became clearer to herthis thing
of his desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this
throne on the awed homage of a world for which his
life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and end-
lessly yearned.
The great purpose, the great end, to which he had
lived grew tangible and present to her; and in her
heart, as she went, she said ever, " Let me only die as
title reed diedwhat matter?so that only the world
BjTieak his name!"
CHAPTER XIII.
One night she stood on the height of the leads of the
tower. The pigeons had gone to roost; the bells had
swung themselves into stillness ; far below the changing
crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm alti-
tude no sound arose from them-. The stars were out,
and a great silyer moon bathed half the skies in its
white glory. la the stones of the parapet wind-sown
blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had
toiled all through it, seeking, seeking, seeking, what
((Sie never found. She was covered with dust; parched
ith thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked
down on the mighty maze of the city, and thought,
" How longHow long?"
Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice mur-
ured at her ear:
"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"
Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great
terror held her mute and breathless there; gazing in
Oie paralysis of horror at this frail life, which was for
her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips
Uie world said to her, " Come, eat and drink and sew
your garments with gems, and kiss men on the mouth
Whilst you slay them, and plunder and poison, and
laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and
*lere is but one god nowthat god is gold."
"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with
soft insistance. " You never find what you seek; you
are always alone, always hungered and poor; always
WTetched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my
golden pear.   It was not wise."
He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief
phrases pierced her heart with the full force of their
odious meaning. She leaned against the wall, breath-
fug hard and fast, mute, for the moment paralyzed.
" You fled away from me that night. It was heroic,
foolish, mad. Yet I bear no anger against it. You
have not loved the old, dead gods for naught.   You
have the temper of their times. You obey them;
though they betray you and forget you Folle-Farine '!
She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of
him, as the bird by the snake.
" Who told you?" she muttered. " Who told vou
that I dwell here?"
"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million
eyes; do you not know? There is nothing you have
not done that lias not been told to me. But I can
always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong- you
are very weak, of course; you have a faith, and you
follow it; and it leads you on and on, on and on and
one day it will disappearand you will plunge after it
and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you
cannot And even his grave. You are like a woman
who seeks for her lover on a battle-field. But the world
is a carnage where the vultures soon pick bare the
bones of the slain ; and all skeletons look alike, and are
alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
"You cameto say this?" she said, through her
locked teeth.
"NayI came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired
soon; but I----- My golden pear would have been bet-
ter vengeance for a slighted passion than his beggar's
quarter, and these wretched rags-----"
She held her misery and her shame and her hatred
alike down under enforced composure.
"There is no shame here," she said, between her
teeth. "A beggar's quarter, perhaps: but these poor
copper coins and these rags I earn with clean hands."
He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign
mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly.
"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you,
that, live as you may, shame will be always your gar-
ment in life and in death? Youa thing beautiful,
nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to
be innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with
shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world,
as I say, will give you one choice. Take its red robe
boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it
with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the
white garments of virtue will envy you the red robe
bitterly then."
Her arms were crossed upon her breast ; her eyes
gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of
the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rush-
ing mill-water.
 You cameto say this?"
"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your
northern god soon tired, I say ; but I-----Look yonder
a moment," he pursued; and he motioned downward
to where the long lines of light gleamed in the won-
drous city which was stretched at their feet; and the
endless murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated
dimly to them on the soft night air. " See here, Folle-
Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the slave of
street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the har-
lot, the beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a
crust and a copper coin ; you have the fate of your
namesake, the dust, to wander a little, and then sink
on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy
and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh,
beautiful fool ! what would your lost lover say if be
holding you here amidst the reek of the mob and the
homage of thieves? He would say of you the most bit-
ter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk
into sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or
make it of more-profit than was her innocence' And
a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a
woman who sells her soulat a loss. You see?ah,
surely, you see. Folle-Farine?"
She shook like a leaf wheie she stood, with the yel-
low and lustrous moonlight about her. She sawshe
saw now !
And she had been mad enough to dream that if she
lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won
back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold
which he had left in her trust as the wage of her
beauty, and found him and gave it to him without a
word, fie would at least believebelieve so much as
this, that her hunger had been famine, and her need
misery, and her fiomelessness that of the stray dog
which is kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from
even a graveyard: but that through it all she had
never touched one coin of that cruel and merciless gift.
" You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mock-
ery of her tormentor's vote. "You see? You have
all the shame: it is your birthright; and you have noth-
ing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a
woman who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There
lies the world, which when I saw you last was to you
only an empty name. Now you know itknow it, at
least, enough to be aware of all you have not, all T^ou
might have in it, if you took my golden pear. You
must be tired, Folle-Farineto stand homeless under
the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summerdust
among the rolling carriages; to stand outcast and
famished before the palace gates; to see the smiles
upon a million mouths, and on them all not one smile
upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that
you may buy a little bread to eat, a little straw to rest
on!   You must be tired, Folle-Farine!"
She was silent where she stood in the moonlight,
with the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far
beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights shining
through the soft darkness of the summer night.
Tired!ah, God!tired, indeed. But not for any
cause of wfiich he spake.
"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear;
and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no
name shall be on the mouths of men as your name
shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be
borne by horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean
above them from a gilded gallery, and mock them at
your fancy there on high in a cloud of flowers. Great
jewels shall beam on you like planets ; and the only
chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like
the chains of a priestess of old. Your mere wish shall
be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring you the thing of your
idlest desire. You have been despised !what ven-
geance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your
glance, as the swine at the feet of Circe? You have
been scorned and accursed !what retribution fuller
than for women to behold in vou the sweetness and
magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and
fall, and worship the Evil which begot you? Has hu-
manity been so fair a friend to you that you can hesi-
tate to strike at its heart with such a vengeanceso
symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity
cast you out to wither at your birtha thing rootless,
nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If
you bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the
fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown
weed out on the dunghill to perish?   I do not speak of
passion. I use no anomalous phrase. 1 am old and
ill-favored ; and I know that, any way, you will forever
hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more
beautiful than the meek submission of the animal
timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to
chain; but your chain shall be of gold, Folle-Farine;
and all women will envy. Name your price, set it high
as you will; there is nothing that 1 will refuse. Nay,
even I will find your lover, who loves not you; and 1
will let you have your fullest vengeance on him. A
noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of
your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be
made known to men; and, before another summer
comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph th
name that is now nothing as the dust isnothing as
you are, Folle-Farine!"
She heard in silence to the end.
On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars
seemed to beam close against fier sight ; below was the
infinite space of the darkness, in which lines of light
glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all creatures
near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro,
rooted in the spaces of the stones.
As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air,
in answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off
a tuft of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out
with one turn or her wrist down into the void of the
darkness.
"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well,
this: I could seize you and cast you down into the
dark below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed.
And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be
just."
And she turned away and walked from him in the
floom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted
er.
CHAPTER XIV.
The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly,
like wolves; the temptations of the city crouched m
wait for her incessantly, like tigers. She was always
hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there
was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her
that she was beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never
dreamed once of listening, of yielding, of taking any
pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never thought
of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a
supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner
passions were absorbed and slain.
Once or twice, through some lighted casement in
some lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed
on fairy lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that
indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl on her
lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.
"To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels
in their breasts, to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh,
to have both hands full of gold, that is what women
love," she thought; and laughed a little in her cold
wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower,
and called the pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset,
and kissed their purple throats, and broke among them
her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on tb
parapet and watched the round white moon rise over'
the shining roofs of Paris.
She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savagf
she was very wretched ; but she had a supreme love ft
her-, and she was strong.
A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal throug*
the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minis
ter, would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and
unclose to him sooner or later.
" You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine," the
Red Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old
man Sartorian ; and he kept his word very patiently.
He was patient, he was wise ; he believed in tbe
power of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a
woman. He knew how to waitunseen, so that this
rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its
wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too
quickly incense, her.
Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to
go among the world of the sleeping poor, at her thresh-
old she would step on some gift, worthy of a queen's
acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there
against tho stone of the stairs.
When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the dose
of a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all
bootless labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there
would be on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as
Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled
amidst them some thin leaf that would have bought
the weight of the pines and of the grapes in gold.
When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and
footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set
flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars,
sick with the tumult and rhe stench and the squalor,
parched with dust, worn with hunger, blird with the
endless search for one face amidst the millionsgoing
home!oh, mockery of the word!to a bed of straw,
to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to
anight of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a
moment now and then through the gloom a vok would
steal to her, saying:
" Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"
But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave M
any answer.
The mill-dust; the reed by the river; the nameless.
friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should
have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance
kreezeso the Red Mouse told her; should have asked
no better ending than to be wafted up a little while
upon the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid
into a crown of pleasure.
Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet so
dared deride her tempters, and defy her denMny, ard
be strong.
For Love was with her.
And though the Red Mouse lies often im Love's
breast, and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet whe
Love once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and
flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a
hand of force; and the beast crouches and flee, an*
dares meddle with Love no more.
In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather,
weather that had the purple glow of the autumnal
storms and the chills of coming winter on it, she arose,
as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent,
and lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds
to rouse the sleepers.
She had barely tasted food for many hours. An a
means of subsistence that she had was the few cote*
earned from those as poor almost as herself. Often
these went in debt to her, and begged for a little time
to get the piece or two of base metal that they owed
her; and she forgave them such debts always, not
m