Explaining the case to me, she said, “Ah, what I suffered! I could never have believed that I cared so much for him. But—what would you?—one attaches oneself, you know. Ah, what I suffered! The anxiety, the terrors! I expected to hear of him run over in the streets. Well, now, I must make an end of this business. I’m going to take him away. So long as he remains in Paris, where there are chemists who will sell him that filthiness (cette crasse) it is hopeless. No sooner do I get my house of cards nicely built up, than—piff!—something happens to knock it over. I am going to take him down into the country, far from any town, far from the railway, where I can guard him better. I know a place, a farmhouse, near Villiers-St.-Jacques, where we can get board. He has a little income, which reaches him every three months from England. Oh, very little, but if I am careful of it, it will pay our way. And then—I will make him work.” “Oh, no,” I protested. “You’re not going to leave the Quarter.” And I’m ashamed to acknowledge, I laboured hard to dissuade her. “Think how we’ll miss you. Think how you’ll bore yourself. And anyhow, he’s not worth it. And besides, you won’t succeed. A man who has an appetite for opium will get it, coûte que coûte. He’d walk twenty miles in bare feet to get it.” This was the argument that I repeated in a dozen different paraphrases. You see, I hadn’t realised yet that it didn’t matter an atom whether she succeeded, or whether he was worth it. He was a mere instrument in the hands of Providence. Let her succeed or let her fail in keeping him from opium: the important thing... how shall I put it? This little Undine had risen out of the black waters of the Latin Quarter, and attached herself to a mortal. What is it that love gains for Undines? “Que veux-tu?” cried P’tit-Bleu. “I am fond of him. I can’t bear to see him ruining himself. I must do what I can.” And the Quarter said, “Ho-ho! You chaps who didn’t believe it was a ’collage’. He-he! What do you say now? She’s chucked up everything, to go and live in the country with him.” In August or September I ran down to the farmhouse near Villiers-St.-Jacques, and passed a week with them. I found a mightily changed Monsieur Edouard, and a curiously changed P’tit-Bleu, as well. He was fat and rosy, he who had been so thin and white. And she—she was grave. Yes, P’tit-Bleu was grave: sober, staid, serious. And her impish, mocking black eyes shone with a strange, serious, calm light. Monsieur Edouard (with whom my relations had long before this become confidential) drew me apart, and told me he was having an exceedingly bad time of it.