I know too well what one suffers.'
"'Especially when love is hopeless.'
"'Hopeless?'
"'Alas! I have never spoken to her. Perhaps never shall!'
[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my
heart is given!'
"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'
"'Poor Claude!'
"They had approached each other. The young man took the tiny hand of
his friend, pressing it in his own.
"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'
"'What! Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancee of Despreaux?'"
Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and
almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love. In return she
reveals her own. It was Good Friday. She had come with her mother
to the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ
and witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires,
brought thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross. In the
press of the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly
faints, when a young man comes kindly to their aid. "She is so
young!" he explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!" "He
looked at me," she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his
half-closed eyelids; and his words were like a caress.
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