mistake, but when I went to the bureau I saw the sheet of paper she had been writing upon, and there was nothing upon it. I went into my bedroom and there was no one there, but as there was a door from the bedroom on to the stairs I went down the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I got out into the street, I saw her just turning a corner, but when I turned the corner there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine, and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a sheep bell. After that I must have lost consciousness, for I knew nothing till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing all around. I had thrown myself into the Seine."
I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The story had been created by the influence, but it had happened as reverie, though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man I have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod.
XLI
Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child. Yet to read his Sacred Poems is to remember that the Holy Child shared his first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note inviting me to "Coffee and cigarettes plentifully" and signed "yours quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine"? I found him at the top of a tenement house in the Rue St Jacques, sitting in an easy
