It was a license of the imagination that would find a
parallel neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of
young girls. For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a
carriage, with a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord,
dining at Very's, deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but
was prepared for my father with a plot more intricate than the
Marriage of Figaro, which he could not possibly have unraveled. All
this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the
artless idea of playing truant that still had charms for me?
"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my
father's money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred
crowns! The joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the
amount; joys that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their
caldron; joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a
deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent
beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem
to see yet. The dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered
upon them. After I had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to
the gaming-table with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp
hands, prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of
chickens.
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