Chapter 7

Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on political
economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the
last, too, of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,
like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so
callous or so stupid as not to recognize there also the voice of
kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning--because what can be the
meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?--arrested one's attention
by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before,
the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole
evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion
of life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. But I left off being
thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted by no ghosts
of the past and by no visions of the future, I walked down the quay of
the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of my friends. I knew where she
would be waiting for her crew, in the little bit of a canal behind the
fort at the entrance of the harbour. The deserted quays looked very
white and dry in the moonlight, and as if frostbound in the sharp air
of that December night. A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a
custom-house guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced close under
the bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on opposite the long,
slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall houses that seemed
to be one immense abandoned building with innumerable windows shuttered
closely. Only here and there a small, dingy cafe for sailors cast a
yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the flagstones. Passing by, one
heard a deep murmur of voices inside--nothing more. How quiet everything
was at the end of the quays on the last night on which I went out for
a service cruise as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a footstep,
except my own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry
going on in the narrow, unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my
ear--and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and glass,
the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung around the corner
of the dead wall which faces across the paved road the characteristic
angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three horses trotted abreast, with
the clatter of hoofs on the granite setts, and the yellow, uproarious
machine jolted violently behind