purchase for me a single day of life and love," I exclaimed, as I
watched it burning, "what care I if the immortality of my name be
consumed with thee? Love, not fame, is my immortality."

That same evening, I went out at nightfall. I sold my poor mother's
diamond. Till then I had kept it, in the hope that my verses might have
redeemed its value, and that I might preserve it untouched. As I handed
it to the jeweller, I kissed it by stealth, and wet it with my tears.
He seemed affected himself, and felt convinced that the diamond was
honestly mine by the grief I testified in disposing of it. The thirty
louis he gave me for it fell from my hands as I reckoned them, as if
the gold had been the price of a sacrilege. Oh, how many diamonds,
twenty times superior in price, would I not often have given since, to
repurchase that same diamond, unique in my eyes!--a fragment of my
mother's heart, one of the last teardrops from her eye, the light of
her love!... On what hand does it sparkle now?...

LXXXV.

Spring had returned. The Tuileries cast each morning upon their idlers
the green shade of their leaves, and showered down the fragrant snow of
their horse-chestnut trees. From the bridges I could perceive beyond
the stony horizon of Chaillot and Passy the long line of verdant and
undulating hills of Fleury, Meudon, and St. Cloud. These hills seemed
to rise as cool and solitary islands in the midst of a chalky ocean.
They raised in my heart feelings of remorse and poignant reproach, and
were images and remembrances which awaked the craving after Nature that
had lain dormant for six months. The broken rays of moonlight floated
at night upon the tepid waters of the river, and the dreamy orb opened,
as far as the Seine could be traced, luminous and fantastic vistas
where the eye lost itself in landscapes of shade and vapor.
Involuntarily the soul followed the eye. The front of the shops, the
balconies, and the windows of the quays were covered with vases of
flowers which shed forth their perfume even on the passers-by. At the
corners of the streets, or the ends of the bridges, the flower-girls,
seated behind screens of flowering plants, waved branches of lilac, as
if to embalm the town. In Julie's room the hearth was converted into a
mossy grotto; the consoles and tables had each their vases of
primroses, violets, lilies of the valley, and roses. Poor flowers,
exiles from the fields! Thus swallows who have heedlessly flow