a part of his
books, but of his prints,--that to which he was the least attached,--and
installed himself in a little house on the Rue Montparnasse, where,
however, he remained but one quarter for two reasons: in the first
place, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he
dared not spend more than two hundred francs on his rent; in the second,
being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots;
which was intolerable to him.

He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his
portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the Salpetriere,
in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where,
for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a garden enclosed by a
hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell
off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance into his new
quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on which his engravings
and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the
rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a
melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder
and said to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,
were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling
name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.

However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some
bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are
but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny
is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a
passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble
philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,
and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is
true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it
seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on
between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look
on at the game with indifference.

It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his
hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather
puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular
swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very
long