But money for bread would have been of more
service. When Rachel lay upon that invalid's chair which she was never
to quit except for her coffin, she gazed one morning upon the breakfast
of delicacies spread before her to tempt the return of absent appetite.
After some moments of silence, she took up a piece of bread as white as
the driven snow, and, sighing, said in that whisper which was all that
remained to her of voice,--"Ay, me! Had the world given me a little more
of _this_, and earlier in my life, I had not been here at
three-and-thirty." Those early years of want which sapped Rachel's life
undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the
damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his
life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money
the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on
him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers
militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued
to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858,
"I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night.
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