his duties, no longer seemed to him valid excuses for his base
abandonment of principle. If he had suffered in the midst of all that
sleek fatness, he had deserved to suffer. And before him arose a
vision of the evil year which he had just spent, his persecution by the
fish-wives, the sickening sensations he had felt on close, damp days,
the continuous indigestion which had afflicted his delicate stomach, and
the latent hostility which was gathering strength against him. All these
things he now accepted as chastisement. That dull rumbling of hostility
and spite, the cause of which he could not divine, must forebode some
coming catastrophe before whose approach he already stooped, with the
shame of one who knows there is a transgression that he must expiate.
Then he felt furious with himself as he thought of the popular rising he
was preparing; and reflected that he was no longer unsullied enough to
achieve success.

In how many dreams he had indulged in that lofty little room, with his
eyes wandering over the spreading roofs of the market pavilions! They
usually appeared to him like grey seas that spoke to him of far-off
countries. On moonless nights they would darken and turn into stagnant
lakes of black and pestilential water. But on bright nights they became
shimmering fountains of light, the moonbeams streaming over both tiers
like water, gliding along the huge plates of zinc, and flowing over the
edges of the vast superposed basins. Then frosty weather seemed to turn
these roofs into rigid ice, like the Norwegian bays over which skaters
skim; while the warm June nights lulled them into deep sleep. One
December night, on opening his window, he had seen them white with snow,
so lustrously white that they lighted up the coppery sky. Unsullied by
a single footstep, they then stretched out like the lonely plains of the
Far North, where never a sledge intrudes. Their silence was beautiful,
their soft peacefulness suggestive of innocence.

And at each fresh aspect of the ever-changing panorama before him,
Florent yielded to dreams which were now sweet, now full of bitter pain.
The snow calmed him; the vast sheet of whiteness seemed to him like a
veil of purity thrown over the filth of the markets. The bright, clear
nights, the shimmering moonbeams, carried him away into the fairy-land
of story-books. It was only the dark, black nights, the burning nights
of June, when he beheld, as it were, a miasmatic marsh, the stagnant