a woman, with more fright than a child.

As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an
extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past
life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his
internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans
of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing
that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the
more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the
Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly
to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed.
He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it
seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this
life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light
of Paradise.

How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?
Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be
authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at
that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning,
saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was
situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in
the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.

BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817

CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817

1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance
which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign.
It is the year in which M. Bruguiere de Sorsum was celebrated. All the
hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird,
were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the
candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in
the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in his costume of a
peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty
of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action.
The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of
Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a
little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angouleme. Hence his peerage. In
1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of
age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux
mitres. The French army