ttle
church of the Bonne-Nouvelle. As soon as she had gone out, he sat down
to a table, and beside the dead body of his love he composed ten
rollicking songs to fit popular airs. The effort cost him untold
anguish, but at last the brain began to work at the bidding of
Necessity, as if suffering were not; and already Lucien had learned to
put Claude Vignon's terrible maxims in practice, and to raise a
barrier between heart and brain. What a night the poor boy spent over
those drinking songs, writing by the light of the tall wax candles
while the priest recited the prayers for the dead!

Morning broke before the last song was finished. Lucien tried it over
to a street-song of the day, to the consternation of Berenice and the
priest, who thought that he was mad:--

Lads, 'tis tedious waste of time
To mingle song and reason;
Folly calls for laughing rhyme,
Sense is out of season.
Let Apollo be forgot
When Bacchus fills the drinking-cup;
Any catch is good, I wot,
If good fellows take it up.
Let philosophers protest,
Let us laugh,
And quaff,
And a fig for the rest!

As Hippocrates has said,
Every jolly fellow,
When a century has sped,
Still is fit and mellow.
No more following of a lass
With the palsy in your legs?
--While your hand can hold a glass,
You can drain it to the dregs,
With an undiminished zest.
Let us laugh,
And quaff,
And a fig for the rest!

Whence we come we know full well.
Whiter are we going?
Ne'er a one of us can tell,
'Tis a thing past knowing.
Faith! what does it signify,
Take the good that Heaven sends;
It is certain that we die,
Certain that we live, my friends.
Life is nothing but a jest.
Let us laugh,
And quaff,
And a fig for the rest!

He was shouting the reckless refrain when d'Arthez and Bianchon
arrived, to find him in a paroxysm of despair and exhaustion, utterly
unable to make a fair copy of his verses. A torrent of tears followed;
and when, amid his sobs, he had told his story, he saw the tears
standing in his friends' eyes.

"This wipes out many sins," said d'Arthez.

"Happy are they who suffer for their sins in this world," the priest
said solemnly.

At the sight of the fair, dead face smiling at Eternity, while
Coralie's lover wrote tavern-catches to buy a grave for her, and