"
For all his light words, the youth in Henri had reappeared. In order
to live until the morrow without too much pain, he had recourse to
exorbitant pleasure; he played, dined, supped with his friends; he
drank like a fish, ate like a German, and won ten or twelve thousand
francs. He left the Rocher de Cancale at two o'clock in the morning,
slept like a child, awoke the next morning fresh and rosy, and dressed
to go to the Tuileries, with the intention of taking a ride, after
having seen Paquita, in order to get himself an appetite and dine the
better, and so kill the time.
At the hour mentioned Henri was on the boulevard, saw the carriage,
and gave the counter-word to a man who looked to him like the mulatto.
Hearing the word, the man opened the door and quickly let down the
step. Henri was so rapidly carried through Paris, and his thoughts
left him so little capacity to pay attention to the streets through
which he passed, that he did not know where the carriage stopped. The
mulatto let him into a house, the staircase of which was quite close
to the entrance. This staircase was dark, as was also the landing upon
which Henri was obliged to wait while the mulatto was opening the door
of a damp apartment, fetid and unlit, the chambers of which, barely
illuminated by the candle which his guide found in the ante-chamber,
seemed to him empty and ill furnished, like those of a house the
inhabitants of which are away. He recognized the sensation which he
had experienced from the perusal of one of those romances of Anne
Radcliffe, in which the hero traverses the cold, sombre, and
uninhabited saloons of some sad and desert spot.
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