selves to boil with anger, to
roar with impatience, to freeze our feet in the mud, to be numbed, and
roasted, and torn by false hopes. We must go, on the faith of a mere
indication, to a vague object, miss our end, curse our luck, improvise
to ourselves elegies, dithyrambics, exclaim idiotically before
inoffensive pedestrians who observe us, knock over old apple-women and
their baskets, run hither and thither, stand on guard beneath a window,
make a thousand suppositions. But, after all, it is a chase, a hunt; a
hunt in Paris, a hunt with all its chances, minus dogs and guns and
the tally-ho! Nothing compares with it but the life of gamblers. But
it needs a heart big with love and vengeance to ambush itself in Paris,
like a tiger waiting to spring upon its prey, and to enjoy the chances
and contingencies of Paris, by adding one special interest to the many
that abound there. But for this we need a many-sided soul--for must we
not live in a thousand passions, a thousand sentiments?

Auguste de Maulincour flung himself into this ardent existence
passionately, for he felt all its pleasures and all its misery. He went
disguised about Paris, watching at the corners of the rue Pagevin and
the rue des Vieux-Augustins. He hurried like a hunter from the rue de
Menars to the rue Soly, and back from the rue Soly to the rue de Menars,
without obtaining either the vengeance or the knowledge which would
punish or reward such cares, such efforts, such wiles. But he had not
yet reached that impatience which wrings our very entrails and makes us
sweat; he roamed in hope, believing that Madame Jules would only refrain
for a few days from revisiting the place where she knew she had been
detected. He devoted the first days therefore, to a careful study of
the secrets of the street. A novice at such work, he dared not question
either the porter or the shoemaker of the house to which Madame Jules
had gone; but he managed to obtain a post of observation in a house
directly opposite to the mysterious apartment. He studied the ground,
trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of prudence, impatience,
love, and secrecy.

Early in the month of March, while busy with plans by which he expected
to strike a decisive blow, he left his post about four in the afternoon,
after one of those patient watches from which he had learned nothing.
He was on his way to his own house whither a matter relating to
his military service called him, when he was ove