Public Hospital.

— One winter night I was following the somber quays that border Notre-Dame. As a poet well understood, it is the district of despair and of death. That region has always been, from the Court of Miracles to the Morgue, the receptacle of all human miseries. Today, when everything is crumbling, those immense monuments of agony, which man calls Holy Houses of Mercy, may perhaps fall as well. I was gazing at those dimmed lights piercing through somber walls, and I said to myself: How many despairing deaths! what a common grave of thought, daily swallowing so many transformed hearts, so many gangrened innocences! It is there that so many dreamers, poets, artists, or scholars have died! There is a small corridor like a bridge over the stream that flows heavily; it is by that way that pass those who live no longer. The dead are then carried to another building, on whose facade ought to be written, as on the gate of hell: Here there is no longer any hope [The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri] . Indeed, it is there that the body is cut up to serve Science, but it is also there that Science strips from faith the least vestige of hope. In the grip of such thoughts, I had taken a few steps, but thought goes faster than we do. I was overtaken by a young man, pale and shivering with cold, who, without ceremony, asked for a light for his pipe; he was a medical student. No sooner said than done; I too was smoking, and I struck up a conversation with the stranger. Wan, thin, and weakened by his vigils, broad of brow and sad of eye, such was, at first sight, the appearance of this man. He seemed pensive, and I communicated my thoughts to him. — "I have just been dissecting," he said, "but I found only matter. Ah! my God," he added with a glacial coldness, "if you wish to rid yourselves of the strange disease called belief in the immortality of the soul, go and see daily, as I do, that matter we call the body dissolve with such uniformity; go and see how those enthusiastic brains, those generous or degraded hearts, are extinguished; go and see whether the nothingness that seizes them is not the same in all. What folly to believe!" — I asked him his age. — "I am 24 years old," he said; "now I must leave you, for it is very cold." Watching him walk away, I asked myself: Is this the result of Science?

I shall continue.

Gérard de Nerval. n I shall continue.

— Note. A few days later Mrs. Costel received, at her home, the following communication, whose analogy with the preceding one offers a remarkable peculiarity.

One night I was walking along the deserted quays; the weather was fine and warm. The golden stars stood out against the somber blue; the Moon was rounding its elegant circle, and its snowy rays lit up, like a smile, the deep water. The poplars, silent guardians of the banks of the Seine, raised their slender forms, and I passed slowly, now looking at the reflection of the stars in the water, now at the reflection of God in the bluish vault. Ahead of me walked a woman, and with a childlike curiosity I followed her steps, which seemed to regulate mine. We walked thus for a long time. Arrived in front of the Hospital, whose facades revealed here and there lighted openings, she stopped and, turning toward me, suddenly addressed me, as though I were her companion. — Friend, she asked, do you believe that those who suffer here suffer more in soul than in body? or do you believe that physical pain extinguishes the divine spark? — I believe, I answered, deeply surprised, that for the majority of the unfortunate who at this hour suffer and agonize, physical pain is the repose and the forgetting of their habitual miseries. — You are mistaken, friend, she resumed, smiling gravely. Illness is the supreme anguish for the disinherited of the Earth, for the poor, the ignorant, and the abandoned; it grants forgetfulness only to those who, like you, suffer nothing but the nostalgia for dreamed-of goods and know only idealized sorrows, crowned with violets. I tried to speak; she made a sign for me to be silent and, raising her white hand toward the Hospital, said: There the unfortunate stir, reckoning the number of hours that illness steals from their wages; there anguished women think of the tavern that numbs grief and makes husbands forget their children's bread; there, yonder, everywhere the earthly cares press in and stifle the pale glimmer of hope, which cannot glide into those desolate souls. God is forgotten still more by these unfortunates, vanquished by suffering, than in their patient toil; for God is very high, very distant, while misery is near. What, then, is to be done to give to these men, to these women, the moral impulse necessary that they may divest themselves of their carnal envelope, not like crawling insects, but like intelligent creatures, or that they may enter less somber and less despairing into the battle of life? You, dreamer; you, poet who rhyme sonnets to the Moon, have you ever once thought of this formidable problem that only two words can solve: charity and love? The woman seemed to grow, and the thrill of divine things ran through me. Listen still — she resumed, and her great voice seemed to fill the city with its harmony — Go, all of you, you the powerful, the rich, the intelligent; go and spread a marvelous tidings; tell those who suffer and who are abandoned, that God, their father, is no longer taking refuge in the inaccessible heaven, and that He sends them, to console and assist them, the Spirits of those they have lost; that their fathers, their mothers, their children, bending over their bedside and speaking to them the familiar tongue, will teach them that beyond the tomb shines a new dawn, like a cloud that dispels earthly ills. The angel opens the eyes of Tobit; let, in turn, the angel of love open the closed souls of those who suffer without hope. And, saying this, the woman lightly touched my eyelids, and I saw, through the walls of the Hospital, the Spirits, pure flames, that made the desolate wards resplendent. Their union with Humanity was being consummated, and the wounds of the soul and of the body were dressed and soothed by the balm of hope. Legions of Spirits, more innumerable and more brilliant than the stars, drove from before them, like impure vapors, despair and doubt, and from the air, from the earth, from the river, escaped a single word: love. I remained a long time motionless and transported out of myself; then the darkness once more invaded the Earth; space became deserted. When I looked around me the woman was no longer there; a great trembling shook me, and I became indifferent to what surrounded me. Since that night they have called me a dreamer and a madman. Oh! what a sweet and sublime madness it is to believe in the awakening of the tomb! But how poignant and stupid is the madness that shows nothingness as the sole compensation for our miseries, as the sole reward for obscure and modest virtues! Who is, here, the true madman: the one who hopes, or the one who despairs?

Alfred de Musset. n After the reading of this communication, Gérard de Nerval spontaneously dictated what follows, through another medium, Mr. Didier:

"My noble friend Musset finished for me. We had come to an understanding; since the continuation was exactly the answer to the first part that I dictated, a different style and more consoling images were needed."

[1] Translator's Note: L'Hôtel-Dieu, in French, corresponds to our Holy Houses of Mercy.

[2]

[v.

Gérard de Nerval.]

[3] [v.

Alfred de Musset.]