heart. You dare hardly lift your eyes, and you say to
yourself: "Which one shall I love in this legion of seraphims? Oh, I will
love them all, all!" Presumptuous youth which doubts of nothing!

But when you have loved one, two, three of them ... afterwards, afterwards?

After having experienced the nothingness of all these trifles, of all these
follies of the heart, of all these caprices of the imagination, of all
these abortions of the thought, of all these voids of the soul, of all
these impurities of the body, of all the uncleanness of the woman with whom
you are satiated, and whose couch you are leaving, then go and speak of
eternal love.

Oh, how right Diogenes was to call love a short epilepsy.

How right that Imperial sophist of the Decline to call it a convulsion! and
the first Bonaparte, an affair of the sopha.

Thus Marcel moralized, like an old prelate, coming out from a closed room
when some filthy scene has been enacted.

The fact is, that for some time he had been the hero of a comedy and of a
drama; the grotesque comedy which he had unrolled with his servant, the
terrible drama in which he saw himself involved with Suzanne Durand. And he
was wearied and satiated. The satisfaction of his senses left him by way of
retaliation, shame, trouble and fear.

Daniel Defoe has written in his admirable book:

"From how many mysterious sources, opposed one to the other, do not
different circumstances cause our passions to proceed? We hate in the
evening what we cherished in the morning; we avoid to-day what we sought
for yesterday; we desire an object passionately, and a few moments after,
we shall not know how to endure the idea of it."

Thus Marcel was cursing love, when Zulma came and knocked at his door.

XC.

LE CYGNE DE LA CROIX.

"As soon as she comes
The Hostess looks hard:
--My beauty no ceremony,
The supper is ready;
Come in, come in, my beauty
Come in, and no more noise
With three gallant captains
You shall spend the night."

(_Popular Songs of France_).

Madame Connard, a widow, and the landlady of the Cygne de la Croix, a godly
and right-thinking person, made a significant grimace when she saw a young
girl, quietly dressed, entering her house, with no other luggage than an
old band-box.

But when she handed her the card of Monsieur Tibulle, judge of the Court at
Vic, president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and member of the
Committee for the prote