e, waiting
for her to go, that he might follow her.

He did not sleep that night. The idea of the child especially harrassed
him. His son! Oh! If he could only have known, have been sure? But what
could he have done? However, he went to the house where she had lived,
and asked about her. He was told that a neighbor, an honorable man of
strict morals, had been touched by her distress, and had married her;
he knew the fault she had committed and had married her, and had even
recognized the child, his, Francois Tessier's child, as his own.

He returned to the _Parc Monceau_ every Sunday, for then he always saw
her, and each time he was seized with a mad, an irresistible longing, to
take his son into his arms, cover him with kisses and to steal him, to
carry him off.

He suffered horribly in his wretched isolation as an old bachelor, with
nobody to care for him, and he also suffered atrocious mental torture,
torn by paternal tenderness springing from remorse, longing and
jealousy, and from that need of loving one's own children, which nature
has implanted into all, and so at last he determined to make a
despairing attempt, and going up to her, as she entered the park, he
said, standing in the middle of the path, pale and with trembling lips:
"You do not recognize me." She raised her eyes, looked at him, uttered
an exclamation of horror, of terror, and, taking the two children by the
hand she rushed away, dragging them after her, whilst he went home and
wept, inconsolably.

Months passed without his seeing her again, but he suffered, day and
night, for he was a prey to his paternal love. He would gladly have
died, if he could only have kissed his son, he would have committed
murder, performed any task, braved any danger, ventured anything. He
wrote to her, but she did not reply, and after writing her some twenty
letters he saw that there was no hope of altering her determination, and
then he formed the desperate resolution of writing to her husband,
being quite prepared to receive a bullet from a revolver, if need be.
His letter only consisted of a few lines, as follows:

"Monsieur,

"You must have a perfect horror of my name, but I am so miserable,
so overcome by misery, that my only hope is in you, and therefore I
venture to request you to grant me an interview of only five
minutes."

"I have the honor, etc."

The next day he received the reply:

"Monsieur,

"I shall ex