Gessonex to taste it, it is not probable that Pauline's piteous confession would have resulted in such wholesale tragedy; for Heloïse St. Cyr, the sweet woman-friend of the bride-elect's, dies, too, and so an entire happy household is destroyed by reason of one man's uncontrollable savagery.
Had Beauvais never put his lips to the fatal glass, he would in all probability, on hearing what had befallen his sweetheart, have quietly broken off the match. For, it must be remembered, he was a respectable young banker, of sober mien and quiet ways, not a Bohemian and frequenter of all-night cafés. But he tasted absinthe, and so brought about his undoing, as many another young Parisian is bringing it about at the present day. Here is the novelist's fierce denunciation of the vice:
"Paris, steeped in vice and drowned in luxury,
feeds her brain on such loathsome literature as
might make even coarse-mouthed Rabelais and
Swift recoil. Day after day, night after night, the
absinthe-drinkers crowd the cafés, and swill the
pernicious drug that of all accursed spirits ever
brewed to make of man a beast, does most swiftly
fly to the seat of reason to there attack and dethrone
it;—and yet, the rulers do nothing to check the
spreading evil,—the world looks on, purblind as
ever and selfishly indifferent,—and the hateful cancer
eats on into the breast of France, bringing death
closer every day!"
