from the tone
of him who said them, in a voice that possesses a spell. Are there
not, in fact, some calm and tender voices that produce upon us the same
effect as a far horizon outlook?

By his dress the dreamer knew him to be a priest, and he saw by the last
gleams of the fading twilight a white, august, worn face. The sight of a
priest issuing from the beautiful cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Vienna,
bearing the Extreme Unction to a dying person, determined the celebrated
tragic author Werner to become a Catholic. Almost the same effect was
produced upon the dreamer when he looked upon the man who had, all
unknowing, given him comfort; on the threatening horizon of his future
he saw a luminous space where shone the blue of ether, and he followed
that light as the shepherds of the Gospel followed the voices that cried
to them: "Christ, the Lord, is born this day."

The man who had said the beneficent words passed on by the wall of the
cathedral, taking, as a result of chance, which often leads to great
results, the direction of the street from which the dreamer came, and to
which he was now returning, led by the faults of his life.

This dreamer was named Godefroid. Whoever reads this history will
understand the reasons which lead the writer to use the Christian names
only of some who are mentioned in it. The motives which led Godefroid,
who lived in the quarter of the Chaussee-d'Antin, to the neighborhood of
Notre-Dame at such an hour were as follows:--

The son of a retail shopkeeper, whose economy enabled him to lay by a
sort of fortune, he was the sole object of ambition to his father and
mother, who dreamed of seeing him a notary in Paris. For this reason,
at the age of seven, he was sent to an institution, that of the Abbe
Liautard, to be thrown among children of distinguished families who,
during the Empire, chose this school for the education of their sons
in preference to the lyceums, where religion was too much overlooked.
Social inequalities were not noticeable among schoolmates; but in 1821,
his studies being ended, Godefroid, who was then with a notary, became
aware of the distance that separated him from those with whom he had
hitherto lived on familiar terms.

Obliged to go through the law school, he there found himself among a
crowd of the sons of the bourgeoisie, who, without fortunes to inherit
or hereditary distinctions, could look only to their own personal
merits or to persistent toil. The hope