was one thought and one remorse in
either mind; between two lovers guilty of a kiss there is a bond quite
as strong and terrible as the bond between two robbers who have murdered
a man. Something had to be said by way of reply.

"I do not care to leave Paris now," Charles said.

"We know why," said the General, with the knowing air of a man who
discovers a secret. "You do not like to leave your uncle, because you do
not wish to lose your chance of succeeding to the title."

The Marquise took refuge in her room, and in her mind passed a pitiless
verdict upon her husband.

"His stupidity is really beyond anything!"

IV. THE FINGER OF GOD

Between the Barriere d'Italie and the Barriere de la Sante, along the
boulevard which leads to the Jardin des Plantes, you have a view of
Paris fit to send an artist or the tourist, the most _blase_ in matters
of landscape, into ecstasies. Reach the slightly higher ground where the
line of boulevard, shaded by tall, thick-spreading trees, curves with
the grace of some green and silent forest avenue, and you see spread
out at your feet a deep valley populous with factories looking almost
countrified among green trees and the brown streams of the Bievre or the
Gobelins.

On the opposite slope, beneath some thousands of roofs packed close
together like heads in a crowd, lurks the squalor of the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau. The imposing cupola of the Pantheon, and the grim
melancholy dome of the Val-du-Grace, tower proudly up above a whole
town in itself, built amphitheatre-wise; every tier being grotesquely
represented by a crooked line of street, so that the two public
monuments look like a huge pair of giants dwarfing into insignificance
the poor little houses and the tallest poplars in the valley. To your
left behold the observatory, the daylight, pouring athwart its windows
and galleries, producing such fantastical strange effects that the
building looks like a black spectral skeleton. Further yet in the
distance rises the elegant lantern tower of the Invalides, soaring
up between the bluish pile of the Luxembourg and the gray tours of
Saint-Sulpice. From this standpoint the lines of the architecture are
blended with green leaves and gray shadows, and change every moment with
every aspect of the heavens, every alteration of light or color in the
sky. Afar, the skyey spaces themselves seem to be full of buildings;
near, wind the serpentine curves of waving trees and green footpa