might not be thinking of other things, might even, perhaps, oh horror! be smiling. The suspense was becoming intolerable, but at last these weary weeks of separation were drawing to their end. The Mautés were returning to Paris.

La dure épreuve va finir :

Mon cœur, souris à l'avenir.

A formal interview was arranged between the two lovers. Verlaine was shy and uncomfortable in the new clothes that his mother had brushed so carefully; but the ice was soon broken, and all through that calm winter of 1869 Verlaine was to live in happy anticipation of these evening visits: Hier, on parlait de choses et d'autres,

Et mes yeux allaient recherchant les vôtres ;

Et votre regard recherchait le mien
Tandis que courait toujours l'entretien.

3

It had been arranged that Paul and Mathilde should marry in the spring of 1870, but Providence appears to have endeavoured at the last moment to prevent this so disastrous marriage. A few weeks before the intended date Mathilde Mauté fell ill with smallpox, and Verlaine's anxiety was such that he overcame his natural cowardice and went to visit her, a frail voice in a darkened room. On her recovery the marriage was fixed for June, but hardly had Verlaine's spirits begun to revive when Madame Mauté in her turn fell ill with the same

sickness. This time the marriage was fixed for the month of August, and Verlaine, who was by then on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was sent off to stay in the country with Madame de Manaury, a cheerful déclassée whom he had known "Chez Nina."

Again the days passed with leaden feet, but at last there came the second week in July, and with it the date of his return to Paris. As he drove from the station, happy in his own preoccupations and excited by the approaching reunion, he scarcely noticed the unwonted effervescence of the boulevards, the crowds and shouting at the street corners. Poor futile Verlaine! he had not been reading the papers out at Argentan. He returned to find that France was at war.

His first impulse was a burst of fury that such people as Louis Napoleon, Eugénie, and that still cryptic von Bismarck, should interfere with his own projects and happiness.

Nous sommes en des temps infâmes,

he exclaims, and then, on the heels of his indignation, the ghastly thought, "Will he, Paul, be called upon to fight?

He flew at once to Mathilde, who stilled his tribulation of course he would not have to fight; he was the son of a widow, and her sole support. Verlaine was comforted and grateful:

J'allais par des chemins perfides,
Douloureusement incertain.

Vos chères mains furent mes guides.

So calm again returned to poor Verlaine, but not for long. Three days before his marriage, when he was sitting quietly in the Hôtel de Ville, one of his friends, Lambert de Roissy, burst into the room, announced his intention of committing suicide, flung a letter on the table, and ran from the building. So soon as he had recovered from his astonishment, Verlaine rushed after him, but he had disappeared. The letter, when opened, contained de Roissy's final dispositions and wishes, but no address. The next day Verlaine received a telegram from de Roissy telling him to go at once to an address in Passy; but it was too late: Verlaine on his arrival found his friend dead, with a bullet through his forehead. The following day was spent, with the assistance of Anatole France, in arranging for, and eventually attending, his friend's funeral. In the evening he returned to Paris in a state of acute nervous tension. The city was alive with rumours. There had been a decisive battle; the French had won a great victory; a whole Prussian Army had been captured; the German Crown Prince was being brought a prisoner to the capital. As he passed the Café de Madrid a group of his friends sitting on the terrace hailed him: they were in a state of great excitement. People were saying that the rumours of victory were premature, that they were exaggerated, even that they were untrue; that in fact it was the French and not the Prussian Army that had been beaten. As Verlaine sat there (a little stimulant to recover his shattered nerve,

and after all to-morrow he was to marry), the excitement in the streets assumed a different character. The news was passing from mouth to mouth. The French Armies had been shattered on the Rhine, and were streaming back to defend Paris. The crowd eddied around the café: some one began to sing the Marseillaise, and suddenly Verlaine, in his cracked falsetto, shouted, "Long live the Republic!" By that time the police were on the scene, and the young poet was seized as one of the instigators of the disturbance. But the crowd hustled round to his support, and Verlaine, freed from the hands of Imperial authority, escaped by a side street, and flung himself panting into another café, where he seized a newspaper to cover his confusion. Suddenly from the sheet he was reading the following words danced before his eyes:

All unmarried men of the Class 1844-45, who have not already enlisted, are immediately to join the colours.

The whole world swam before him: here at the eleventh hour was the final blow to his hopes of regeneration. In a panic he rushed round to the rue Nicolet, where Mathilde again succeeded in lulling him to reason. After all the banns had been published, and this by itself would exclude him from the scope of that cruel order.

Mathilde was right in her opinion. On the next day the marriage was duly solemnised at Notre Dame de Coulaincourt.

E

4

The newly married pair settled in a flat at No. 2 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, the corner house, down there by the quays, with Notre Dame reflected in the water below them. But public events were not for long to allow them to enjoy their happiness. Within a few weeks the news came that the French Armies, and the Emperor with them, had surrendered to the Prussians, and that the latter were about to invest Paris. Verlaine was not a patriotic person. In fact, when he was first told that the Germans might enter the capital he exclaimed :

66

Why, at last we shall have some good music.' Nor was he very brave. But he appears at this juncture to have been fired by the general excitement of the moment. In an impulse of martial ardour he enlisted in the National Guard and was allotted to the southern sector of the Paris fortifications between Issy and Montrouge. He never pretended that this burst of patriotism was more than a whim. In Louise Leclercq, a short story which he published in his later life, and which is largely autobiographical in character, he characterises his impulse at that moment as more or less superficial—the fun of playing at soldiers." His service in the defence of Paris, however motived, was to have a most unfortunate effect upon his personal circumstances. With his peculiar facility for becoming intimate only with his intellectual