ar of Paris, which seemed to have a reddish vapor hanging over it. It
was a kind of continual rumbling, which was at times answered by the
whistle of a train at full speed, in the distance, traveling to the
ocean, through the provinces.

The fresh air on the faces of the two men rather overcame them at first,
made the doctor lose his equilibrium a little, and increased Caravan's
giddiness, from which he had suffered since dinner. He walked as if he
were in a dream; his thoughts were paralyzed, although he felt no grief,
for he was in a state of mental torpor that prevented him from suffering,
and he even felt a sense of relief which was increased by the mildness
of the night.

When they reached the bridge they turned to the right, and they got the
fresh breeze from the river. It rolled along, calm and melancholy,
bordered by tall poplar trees, and the stars looked as if they were
floating on the water and were moving with the current. A slight, white
mist that floated over the opposite banks, filled their lungs with a
sensation of cold, and Caravan stopped suddenly, for he was struck by
that smell from the water, which brought back old memories to his mind.
For he, suddenly, in his mind, saw his mother again, in Picardy, as he
had seen her years before, kneeling in front of their door, and washing
the heaps of linen, by her side, in the stream that ran through their
garden. He almost fancied that he could hear the sound of the wooden
beetle with which she beat the linen, in the calm silence of the country,
and her voice, as she called out to him:

"Alfred, bring me some soap." And he smelt that odor of the trickling
water, of the mist rising from the wet ground, the heap of wet linen,
which he should never forget, and which came back to him on the very
evening on which his mother died.

He stopped, with a feeling of despair, and felt heartbroken at that
eternal separation. His life seemed cut in half, all his youth
disappeared, swallowed up by that death. All the _former_ life was over
and done with, all the recollections of his youthful days would vanish;
for the future, there would be nobody to talk to him of what had happened
in days gone by, of the people he had known of old, of his own part of
the country, and of his past life; that was a part of his existence which
existed no longer, and the other might as well end now.

And then he saw _Mamma_ as she was when younger, wearing well-worn
dresses, which he reme