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Bohemians of the Latin Quarter by Henry Murger
page 72 of 417 (17%)
"Ah!" said Colline in a tone of raillery, "what can one be waiting for
when one is twenty, when there are stars in the sky and songs in the
air?"

"Speak in prose."

"I am waiting for a girl."

"Good night," said Rodolphe, who went on his way continuing his
monologue. "What," said he, "is it St. Cupid's Day and cannot I take a
step without running up against people in love? It is scandalously
immoral. What are the police about?"

As the gardens of the Luxembourg were still open, Rodolphe passed into
them to shorten his road. Amidst the deserted paths he often saw
flitting before him, as though disturbed by his footsteps, couples
mysteriously interlaced, and seeking, as a poet has remarked, the
two-fold luxury of silence and shade.

"This," said Rodolphe, "is an evening borrowed from a romance." And yet
overcome, despite himself, by a langourous charm, he sat down on a seat
and gazed sentimentally at the moon.

In a short time he was wholly under the spell of a feverish
hallucination. It seemed to him that the gods and heroes in marble who
peopled the garden were quitting their pedestals to make love to the
goddesses and heroines, their neighbors, and he distinctly heard the
great Hercules recite a madrigal to the Vedella, whose tunic appeared to
him to have grown singularly short.

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