White Stains

PREFACE 15 blessing of the officiating bishop, “ I renounce for ever this idolatrous church ” ; and was quietly removed. He told Mathilde Doriac that he had been to Eton and Cambridge—neither institution, however, preserves any record of such admission. The imagination of George, indeed, is tremendously fertile with regard to events in his own life. His own story is that he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1856, and was sent down two years later for an article which he had contributed to some University or College Magazine. No confirmation of any sort is to be found anywhere with regard to these or any other statements of our author. There is, however, no doubt that in 1861 he quarrelled with his family ; went over to Paris, where he settled down, at first, like every tufthead, somewhere in the Quartier Latin ; later, with Mathilde Doriac, the noble woman who became his mistress and held to him through all the terrible tragedy of his moral, mental, and physical life, in the Rue du Fau- bourg-Poissonnière. At his house there the frightful scenes of ’68 took place, and it was there too that he was apprehended after the murders which he describes so faithfully in “ Abysmos ”. He had just finished this poem with a shriek of triumph, and had read it through