hed the cavatina from _Tancred_. He seemed
to have come up through the floor, impelled by some stage mechanism. He
stood for a moment motionless and sombre, watching the festivities, a
murmur of which had perhaps reached his ears. His almost somnambulistic
preoccupation was so concentrated upon things that, although he was
in the midst of many people, he saw nobody. He had taken his place
unceremoniously beside one of the most fascinating women in Paris, a
young and graceful dancer, with slender figure, a face as fresh as a
child's, all pink and white, and so fragile, so transparent, that it
seemed that a man's glance must pass through her as the sun's rays pass
through flawless glass. They stood there before me, side by side, so
close together, that the stranger rubbed against the gauze dress, and
the wreaths of flowers, and the hair, slightly crimped, and the floating
ends of the sash.

I had brought that young woman to Madame de Lanty's ball. As it was
her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh; but I
hastily made an imperious sign which abashed her and inspired respect
for her neighbor. She sat down beside me. The old man did not choose
to leave the charming creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the
silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are
subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down
beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements
were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, which
characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down upon
his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words. His
cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling into a well.
The young woman nervously pressed my hand, as if she were trying to
avoid a precipice, and shivered when that man, at whom she happened to
be looking, turned upon her two lifeless, sea-green eyes, which could be
compared to nothing save tarnished mother-of-pearl.

"I am afraid," she said, putting her lips to my ear.

"You can speak," I replied; "he hears with great difficulty."

"You know him, then?"

"Yes."

Thereupon she summoned courage to scrutinize for a moment that creature
for which no human language has a name, form without substance, a being
without life, or life without action. She was under the spell of that
timid curiosity which impels women to seek perilous excitement, to gaze
at chained tigers an