To please him she went to a window and saw, upon the narrow iron-grilled balcony, a tent of striped chintz, like the awning of a café, supported by a light iron framework. Her eyes were blurred by unshed tears, and she divined rather than saw the far-stretching Avenue, palpitating with the fevered life of the Great Exhibition year; the intoxicating sunlight, the horse-chestnut trees dappling with shade the leafy footways, the white fountain-spray and flaming flower-beds of the Rond Point, the flashing flickering stream of carriages flowing to the Bois with their freight of beauty and wealth and insolent vice. "The first time I looked out of that window," he said, "I seemed to myself like Dante at the end of the Divine Comedy, when once again he beheld the stars. You cannot know what I felt when after so many years I saw the world again for the first time, with half an eye, for ever so little a space. I had my wife's opera-glass in my hand, and I saw with inexpressible pleasure a young vagrant vendor of pastry offering his goods to two ladies in crinolines, with a small dog. I closed the glass; I could see no more, for I envied the dog. The nurse carried me back to bed and gave me morphia. That day I looked no more. For me the Divine Comedy was far from ended. The divine humorist has even descended to a pun. Talk of Mahomet's coffin. I lie between the two Champs-Elysées, the one where warm life palpitates, and that other, where the pale ghosts flit." Then it was not a momentary fantasy of the pen, but an abiding mood that had paid blasphemous homage to the "Aristophanes of Heaven." Indeed, had it not always run through his work, this conception of humor in the grotesqueries of history, "the dream of an intoxicated divinity"? But his amusement thereat had been genial. "Like a mad harlequin," he had written of Byron, the man to whom he felt himself most related, "he strikes a dagger into his own heart, to sprinkle mockingly with the jetting black blood the ladies and gentlemen around.... My blood is not so splenetically black; my bitterness comes only from the gall-apples of my ink." But now, she thought, that bitter draught always at his lips had worked into his blood at last. "Are you quite incurable?" she said gently, as she returned from the window to seat herself at his mattress graveside.