me to pass; but the next
day, when I awoke and put memory in the witness-box, I could not conceal
from myself that the tale presented a good many improbable features. I
had no mind for the studio, after all, and went instead to the
Luxembourg gardens, there, among the sparrows and the statues and the
fallen leaves, to cool and clear my head. It is a garden I have always
loved. You sit there in a public place of history and fiction. Barras
and Fouche have looked from these windows. Lousteau and De Banville (one
as real as the other) have rhymed upon these benches. The city tramples
by without the railings to a lively measure; and within and about you,
trees rustle, children and sparrows utter their small cries, and the
statues look on for ever. Here, then, in a seat opposite the gallery
entrance, I set to work on the events of the last night, to disengage
(if it were possible) truth from fiction.

The house, by daylight, had proved to be six stories high, the same as
ever. I could find, with all my architectural experience, no room in its
altitude for those interminable stairways, no width between its walls
for that long corridor, where I had tramped at night. And there was yet
a greater difficulty. I had read somewhere an aphorism that everything
may be false to itself save human nature. A house might elongate or
enlarge itself--or seem to do so to a gentleman who had been dining. The
ocean might dry up, the rocks melt in the sun, the stars fall from
heaven like autumn apples; and there was nothing in these incidents to
boggle the philosopher. But the case of the young lady stood upon a
different foundation. Girls were not good enough, or not good that way,
or else they were too good. I was ready to accept any of these views:
all pointed to the same conclusion, which I was thus already on the
point of reaching, when a fresh argument occurred, and instantly
confirmed it. I could remember the exact words we had each said; and I
had spoken, and she had replied, in English. Plainly, then, the whole
affair was an illusion: catacombs, and stairs, and charitable lady, all
were equally the stuff of dreams.

I had just come to this determination, when there blew a flaw of wind
through the autumnal gardens; the dead leaves showered down, and a
flight of sparrows, thick as a snowfall, wheeled above my head with
sudden pipings. This agreeable bustle was the affair of a moment, but it
startled me from the abstraction into which I