keenly regretted and so ardently
longed for. He would hide himself there, he told himself, and again lead
the quiet, peaceable life that he had lived years ago. The police would
never be any the wiser; and everyone would imagine, indeed, that he
had died over yonder, across the sea. Then he thought of his arrival at
Havre, where he had landed with only some fifteen francs tied up in a
corner of his handkerchief. He had been able to pay for a seat in
the coach as far as Rouen, but from that point he had been forced to
continue his journey on foot, as he had scarcely thirty sous left of his
little store. At Vernon his last copper had gone in bread. After that he
had no clear recollection of anything. He fancied that he could remember
having slept for several hours in a ditch, and having shown the papers
with which he had provided himself to a gendarme; however, he had only a
very confused idea of what had happened. He had left Vernon without any
breakfast, seized every now and then with hopeless despair and raging
pangs which had driven him to munch the leaves of the hedges as he
tramped along. A prey to cramp and fright, his body bent, his sight
dimmed, and his feet sore, he had continued his weary march, ever drawn
onwards in a semi-unconscious state by a vision of Paris, which, far,
far away, beyond the horizon, seemed to be summoning him and waiting for
him.

When he at length reached Courbevoie, the night was very dark. Paris,
looking like a patch of star-sprent sky that had fallen upon the black
earth, seemed to him to wear a forbidding aspect, as though angry at his
return. Then he felt very faint, and his legs almost gave way beneath
him as he descended the hill. As he crossed the Neuilly bridge he
sustained himself by clinging to the parapet, and bent over and looked
at the Seine rolling inky waves between its dense, massy banks. A red
lamp on the water seemed to be watching him with a sanguineous eye.
And then he had to climb the hill if he would reach Paris on its summit
yonder. The hundreds of leagues which he had already travelled were
as nothing to it. That bit of a road filled him with despair. He would
never be able, he thought, to reach yonder light crowned summit. The
spacious avenue lay before him with its silence and its darkness, its
lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled
with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the
gloomy gaps of side street