he went away quickly in order to avoid shaking hands with Farandal,
who was approaching slowly in making the rounds of the Hammam.

He remained barely a quarter of an hour in the large quiet resting-room,
in the center of a row of cells containing the beds, with a _parterre_
of African plants and a little fountain in the center. He had a feeling
of being pursued, menaced, that the Marquis would join him, and that he
should be compelled, with extended hand, to treat him as a friend, when
he longed to kill him.

He soon found himself again on the Boulevard, covered with dead leaves.
They fell no more, the last ones having been detached by a long blast of
wind. Their red and yellow carpet shivered, stirred, undulated from one
sidewalk to another, blown by puffs of the rising wind.

Suddenly a sort of roaring noise glided over the roofs, the animal-like
sound of a passing tempest, and at the same time a furious gust of wind
that seemed to come from the Madeleine swept through the Boulevard.

All the fallen leaves, which appeared to have been waiting for it, rose
at its approach. They ran before it, massing themselves, whirling, and
rising in spirals up to the tops of the buildings. The wind chased them
like a flock, a mad flock that fled before it, flying toward the gates
of Paris and the free sky of the suburbs. And when the great cloud
of leaves and dust had disappeared on the heights of the Quartier
Malesherbes, the sidewalks and roads remained bare, strangely clean and
swept.

Bertin was thinking: "What will become of me? What shall I do? Where
shall I go?" And he returned home, unable to think of anything.

A news-stand attracted his eye. He bought seven or eight newspapers,
hoping that he might find in them something to read for an hour or two.

"I will breakfast here," said he, as he entered, and went up to his
studio.

But as he sat down he felt that he could not stay there, for throughout
his body surged the excitement of an angry beast.

The newspapers, which he glanced through, could not distract his mind
for a minute, and the news he read met his eye without reaching his
brain. In the midst of an article which he was not trying to comprehend,
the name of Guilleroy made him start. It was about the session of the
Chamber, where the Count had spoken a few words.

His attention, aroused by that call, was now arrested by the name of the
celebrated tenor Montrose, who was to give, about the end of December,