ome sort, the persuasive grip of comparisons, and the irresistible
attraction of memories to lead him back to a woman. True love rules
above all through recollection. A woman who is not engraven upon the
soul by excess of pleasure or by strength of emotion, how can she ever
be loved? In Henri's case, Paquita had established herself by both of
these reasons. But at this moment, seized as he was by the satiety of
his happiness, that delicious melancholy of the body, he could hardly
analyze his heart, even by recalling to his lips the taste of the
liveliest gratifications that he had ever grasped.

He found himself on the Boulevard Montmartre at the break of day,
gazed stupidly at the retreating carriage, produced two cigars from his
pocket, lit one from the lantern of a good woman who sold brandy and
coffee to workmen and street arabs and chestnut venders--to all the
Parisian populace which begins its work before daybreak; then he went
off, smoking his cigar, and putting his hands in his trousers' pockets
with a devil-may-care air which did him small honor.

"What a good thing a cigar is! That's one thing a man will never tire
of," he said to himself.

Of the girl with the golden eyes, over whom at that time all the elegant
youth of Paris was mad, he hardly thought. The idea of death, expressed
in the midst of their pleasure, and the fear of which had more than once
darkened the brow of that beautiful creature, who held to the houris of
Asia by her mother, to Europe by her education, to the tropics by her
birth, seemed to him merely one of those deceptions by which women seek
to make themselves interesting.

"She is from Havana--the most Spanish region to be found in the New
World. So she preferred to feign terror rather than cast in my teeth
indisposition or difficulty, coquetry or duty, like a Parisian woman. By
her golden eyes, how glad I shall be to sleep."

He saw a hackney coach standing at the corner of Frascati's waiting for
some gambler; he awoke the driver, was driven home, went to bed, and
slept the sleep of the dissipated, which for some queer reason--of which
no rhymer has yet taken advantage--is as profound as that of innocence.
Perhaps it is an instance of the proverbial axiom, _extremes meet_.

About noon De Marsay awoke and stretched himself; he felt the grip of
that sort of voracious hunger which old soldiers can remember having
experienced on the morrow of victory. He was delighted, therefore, to