t misfortunes which made us laugh!
Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost!
And that dear portrait of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup!
I was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms in haste.
A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a centime''s worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God.
Dost thou recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags?
Oh! what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly depths!
The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle poet.
In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way to la Courtille.
These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.