eyes. Yet she knew
nothing of him. Whence had he come? how had he crept into her
intimacy? what manner of man was he that she had yielded to him--she
who would rather have perished than yield to another? She knew nothing
of him; it had all sprung from some sudden tottering of her reason. He
had been a stranger to her on the last as on the first day. In vain
did she patch together little scattered things and circumstances--his
words, his acts, everything that her memory recalled concerning him.
He loved his wife and his child; he smiled with delicate grace; he
outwardly appeared a well-bred man. Then she saw him again with
inflamed visage, and trembling with passion. But weeks passed, and he
vanished from her sight. At this moment she could not have said where
she had spoken to him for the last time. He had passed away, and his
shadow had gone with him. Their story had no other ending. She knew
him not.

Over the city the sky had now become blue, and every cloud had
vanished. Wearied with her memories, and rejoicing in the purity
before her, Helene raised her head. The blue of the heavens was
exquisitely clear, but still very pale in the light of the sun, which
hung low on the horizon, and glittered like a silver lamp. In that icy
temperature its rays shed no heat on the glittering snow. Below
stretched the expanses of roofs--the tiles of the Army Bakehouse, and
the slates of the houses on the quay--like sheets of white cloth
fringed with black. On the other bank of the river, the square stretch
of the Champ-de-Mars seemed a steppe, the black dots of the straggling
vehicles making one think of sledges skimming along with tinkling
bells; while the elms on the Quai d'Orsay, dwarfed by the distance,
looked like crystal flowers bristling with sharp points. Through all
the snow-white sea the Seine rolled its muddy waters edged by the
ermine of its banks; since the evening before ice had been floating
down, and you could clearly see the masses crushing against the piers
of the Pont des Invalides, and vanishing swiftly beneath the arches.
The bridges, growing more and more delicate with the distance, seemed
like the steps of a ladder of white lace reaching as far as the
sparkling walls of the Cite, above which the towers of Notre-Dame
reared their snow-white crests. On the left the level plain was broken
up by other peaks. The Church of Saint-Augustin, the Opera House, the
Tower of Saint-Jacques, looked like mountains clad wi