artless evidences of affection which
the young girl had given him. And yet she no longer loved him! It was her
own mother who said so. After that could he still hope?

A prey to this deep trouble, Pierre entered Paris. On finding himself
face to face with Cayrol, the young man's first idea was, as Cayrol had
guessed, to cry out, "What's going on? Is all lost to me?" A sort of
anxious modesty kept back the words on his lips. He would not admit that
he doubted. And, then, Cayrol would only have needed to answer that all
was over, and that he could put on mourning for his love. He turned
around, and went out.

The tumult of Paris surprised and stunned him. After spending a year in
the peaceful solitudes of Africa, to find himself amid the cries of
street-sellers, the rolling of carriages, and the incessant movement of
the great city, was too great a contrast to him. Pierre was overcome by
languor; his head seemed too heavy for his body to carry; he mechanically
entered a cab which conveyed him to the Hotel du Louvre. Through the
window, against the glass of which he tried to cool his heated forehead,
he saw pass in procession before his eyes, the Column of July, the church
of St. Paul, the Hotel de Ville in ruins, and the colonnade of the
Louvre.

An absurd idea took possession of him. He remembered that during the
Commune he was nearly killed in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of
a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise. He
thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him. Then,
as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized. He
saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants. A catafalque
contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling
hand, to throw holy water on the cloth which covered the bier. And a
voice said within him:

"You are dead, since Micheline is about to marry another."

He made an effort to banish this importunate idea. He could not succeed.
Thoughts flew through his brain with fearful rapidity. He thought he was
beginning to be seized with brain fever. And this dismal ceremony kept
coming before him with the same chants, the same words repeated, and the
same faces appearing. The houses seemed to fly before his vacant eyes. To
stop this nightmare he tried to count the gas-lamps: one, two, three,
four, five--but the same thought interrupted his calculation:

"You are dead, since your betrothed