corners and round the doors
and windows, in a manner to imitate freestone, suggested some clownish
parvenu awkwardly arrayed in his Sunday toggery. The sight fairly
enraged the painter. No, no, nothing of himself, nothing of Christine,
nothing of the great love of their youth remained there! He wished to
look still further; he turned round behind the house, and sought for
the wood of oak trees where they had left the living quiver of their
embraces; but the wood was dead, dead like all the rest, felled, sold,
and burnt! Then he made a gesture of anathema, in which he cast all his
grief to that stretch of country which was now so changed that he could
not find in it one single token of his past life. And so a few years
sufficed to efface the spot where one had laboured, loved, and suffered!
What was the use of man's vain agitation if the wind behind him swept
and carried away all the traces of his footsteps? He had rightly
realised that he ought not to return thither, for the past is simply
the cemetery of our illusions, where our feet for ever stumble against
tombstones!

'Let us go!' he cried; 'let us go at once! It's stupid to torture one's
heart like this!'

When they were on the new bridge, Sandoz tried to calm him by showing
him the view which had not formerly existed, the widened bed of the
Seine, full to the brim, as it were, and the water flowing onward,
proudly and slowly. But this water failed to interest Claude, until he
reflected that it was the same water which, as it passed through Paris,
had bathed the old quay walls of the Cite; and then he felt touched, he
leant over the parapet of the bridge for a moment, and thought that he
could distinguish glorious reflections in it--the towers of Notre-Dame,
and the needle-like spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, carried along by the
current towards the sea.

The two friends missed the three o'clock train, and it was real torture
to have to spend two long hours more in that region, where everything
weighed so heavily on their shoulders. Fortunately, they had forewarned
Christine and Madame Sandoz that they might return by a night train
if they were detained. So they resolved upon a bachelor dinner at a
restaurant on the Place du Havre, hoping to set themselves all right
again by a good chat at dessert as in former times. Eight o'clock was
about to strike when they sat down to table.

Claude, on leaving the terminus, with his feet once more on the Paris
pavement, had