Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/364

336 brazen and bragging reveller that the onlookers could have imagined that he was crying from laughter.

Toward evening he joined several poor devils of dancers from an insolvent theater, whom he was taking to dine at Casti's, the fashionable restaurant. It was to be his last feast! No matter what he did to forget his thoughts, he found himself lacking in spirit. Instead of enlivening him, the wine only made him more sorrowful. Moreover, he was exhausted with fatigue. He grew drowsy in the middle of the repast while around him the others gorged and drank in silence.

Partly in dream, partly in revery, certain landscapes came back to him like a sweet vexation. His past, his lost life whispered in gusts loaded with moldiness, with rancid perfume, with a sickening roar, and, in this retrospective and intermittent breeze, there tumbled the rough flourishes heard every evening in low cabarets. The uselessness of his days defiled before Laurent like a macabre procession, a trail of clowns and slick Pierrots, trifling, lisping cold and plaintive, whom salacious paroxysms electrified, and who twisted and mingled in dances as lascivious as the spasm itself …

As he was finally falling asleep, indifferent to the grateful and almost canine caresses of a girl, he jumped up suddenly at a lively explanation at the bottom of the stairs, followed by footsteps upon the stairway, then in the hall, that drew near the room in which Laurent was dining, but which stopped before the next door.

"Open! In the name of the law!" commanded a grave voice, with the brutally professional intonation of a superintendent of police.