"Since thou canst not
purchase for me a single day of life and love," I exclaimed, as I
watched it burning, "what care I if the immortality of my name be
consumed with thee? Love, not fame, is my immortality."
That same evening, I went out at nightfall. I sold my poor mother's
diamond. Till then I had kept it, in the hope that my verses might have
redeemed its value, and that I might preserve it untouched. As I handed
it to the jeweller, I kissed it by stealth, and wet it with my tears.
He seemed affected himself, and felt convinced that the diamond was
honestly mine by the grief I testified in disposing of it. The thirty
louis he gave me for it fell from my hands as I reckoned them, as if
the gold had been the price of a sacrilege. Oh, how many diamonds,
twenty times superior in price, would I not often have given since, to
repurchase that same diamond, unique in my eyes!--a fragment of my
mother's heart, one of the last teardrops from her eye, the light of
her love!... On what hand does it sparkle now?...
LXXXV.
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