rning a corner, but when I turned the corner
there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly
seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine,
and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into
the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the
opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just
the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a
sheep bell. After that I must have lost consciousness, for I knew nothing
till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing
all round. I had thrown myself into the Seine."

I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for
I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to
symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything
that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The
story had been created by the influence but it had remained a reverie,
though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened
as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he
had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of
all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man, I
have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when
most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having
been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod.

Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so
little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read
his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His
first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note
inviting me to "coffee and cigarettes plentifully," and signed "Yours
quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?" I found him at the top of a tenement
house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg
swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew
Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg
for he know it "well, too well" and "lived in it like a fly in a pot of
marmalade." He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the
room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a
long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy
"Erysipelas." Meanwhile