s own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave
respect for darkness.

BOOK SECOND--THE FALL

CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING

Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a
man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D----The few
inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the
moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was
difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was
a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.
He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a
drooping leather visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by
sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow
linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view
of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of
blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the
other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with
a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier
knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous,
knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a
shaved head and a long beard.

The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not
what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut,
yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to
have been cut for some time.

No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came
he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance
into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously, had
witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes
to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much
fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated below
the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,
and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He
must have been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him
stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in
the market-place.

On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left,
and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out
a quarter of an hour later. A gen