isian life draws us by its thousand
attractions. The days which seem interminable when one is twenty rush by
as if on wings when one is fifty. One has not even time to stop to see
the friends one loves. At the last moment, if one is right, one ought to
say, 'How I have cast to the winds everything precious which life has
given me. How foolish I have been--how stupid.' Pay no attention to my
philosophisms--the cell! Mazas forces one to think!

"One day--it was one morning--on returning from the club where I had
passed the night stupidly losing sums which would have given joy to
hundreds of families, I found on my desk a message from Rovere. If one
would look through my papers one would find it there--I kept it. Rovere
begged me to come to him immediately. I shivered--a sharp presentiment
of death struck me. The writing was trembling, unlike his own. I struck
my forehead in anger. This message had been waiting for me since the
night before, while I was spending the hours in gambling. If, when I
hurried toward the Boulevard de Clichy, I had found Rovere dead on my
arrival, I could not, believe me, have experienced greater despair. His
assassination seemed to me atrocious; but I was at least able to assure
him that his friendship was returned. I hastily read the telegram, threw
myself into a fiacre, and hastened to his apartments. The woman who
acted as housekeeper for him, Mme. Moniche, the portress, raising her
arms as she opened the door for me, said:

"'Ah! Monsieur, but Monsieur has waited for you. He has repeated your
name all night. He nearly died, but he is better now.'

"Rovere, sitting the night before by his fire, had been stricken by
lateral paralysis, and as soon as he could hold a pen, in spite of the
orders of the physician who had been quickly called, had written and
sent the message to me some hours before.

"As soon as he saw me he--the strong man, the mad misanthrope, silent
and sombre--held me in his arms and burst into tears. His embrace was
that of a man who concentrates in one being all that remains of hope.

"'Thou! thou art here!' he said in a low tone. 'If thou knewest!'

"I was moved to the depths of my heart. That manly face, usually so
energetic, wore an expression of terror which was in some way almost
childish, a timorous fright. The tears rose in his eyes.

"'Oh! how I have waited for thee! how I have longed for thee!'

"He repeated this phrase with anxious obstinacy. Then he seemed to