Instead of this, however, the elder of the two informed him that the dinner had been excellent, which was the more fortunate, as it was decidedly the last that either of them should ever eat; that for his bill, he must of necessity excuse the payment of it, as, in fact, that neither of them possessed a single sous; that upon no other occasion would they have thus violated the customary _etiquette_ between guest and landlord; but that finding this world, with its toils and its troubles, unworthy of them, they had determined once more to enjoy a repast of which their poverty must for ever prevent the repetition, and then take leave of existence for ever! For the first part of this resolution, he declared that it had, thanks to the cook and his cellar, been achieved nobly; and for the last, it would soon follow, for the _café noir_, besides the little glass of his admirable cognac, had been medicated with that which would speedily settle all their accounts for them. The _restaurateur_ was enraged. He believed no part of the rhodomontade but that which declared their inability to discharge their bill, and he talked loudly in his turn of putting them into the hands of the police. At length, however, upon their offering to give up their address, he was induced to allow them to depart. On the following day, either the hope of obtaining his money or some vague fear that they might have been in earnest in the wild tale that they had told him, induced this man to go to the address they had left with him; and he there heard that the two unhappy boys had been that morning found lying together, hand-in-hand, on a bed hired a few weeks before by one of them. When they were discovered, they were already dead and cold. On a small table in the room lay many written papers, all expressing aspirations after greatness that should cost neither labour nor care, a profound contempt for those who were satisfied to live by the sweat of their brow, sundry quotations from Victor Hugo, and a request that their names and the manner of their death might be transmitted to the newspapers. Many are the cases of young men, calling themselves friends, who have thus encouraged each other to make their final exit from life, if not with applause, at least with effect. And more numerous still are the tales recounted of young men and women found dead, and locked in each other’s arms, fulfilling literally, and with most sad seriousness, the destiny sketched so merrily in an old song— “Gai, gai, marions-nous— Mettons-nous dans la misère; Gai, gai, marions-nous— Mettons-nous la corde au cou.”[83] A woman drowned herself by breaking a hole in the ice of a pond sufficiently large to admit her head, which she put into the water, so that her body remained quite dry. A Greenwich pensioner, who had his allowance stopped from some misconduct, committed suicide by stabbing himself with his spectacles, which he sharpened to a point for that purpose.