ugh the
mist of evening; it was the hour of twilight--that strange hour, which
gives to the most solid forms a vague, indefinite fantastic
appearance--when the sound of firm and regular footsteps was heard on the
stony soil of the rising ground, and, between the black trunks of the
trees, a man passed slowly onward.

His figure was tall, his head was bowed upon his breast; his countenance
was noble, gentle, and sad; his eyebrows, uniting in the midst, extended
from one temple to the other, like a fatal mark on his forehead.

This man did not seem to hear the distant tolling of so many funeral
bells--and yet, a few days before, repose and happiness, health and joy,
had reigned in those villages through which he had slowly passed, and
which he now left behind him, mourning and desolate. But the traveller
continued on his way, absorbed in his own reflections.

"The 13th of February approaches," thought he; "the day approaches, in
which the descendants of my beloved sister, the last scions of our race,
should meet in Paris. Alas! it is now a hundred and fifty years since,
for the third time, persecution scattered this family over all the
earth--this family, that I have watched over with tenderness for eighteen
centuries, through all its migrations and exiles, its changes of
religion, fortune, and name!

"Oh! for this family, descended from the sister of the poor shoemaker,[2]
what grandeur and what abasement, what obscurity and what splendor, what
misery and what glory! By how many crimes has it been sullied, by how
many virtues honored! The history of this single family is the history of
the human race!

"Passing, in the course of so many generations, through the veins of the
poor and the rich, of the sovereign and the bandit, of the wise man and
the fool, of the coward and the brave, of the saint and the atheist, the
blood of my sister has transmitted itself to this hour.

"What scions of this family are now remaining? Seven only.

"Two orphans, the daughters of proscribed parents--a dethroned prince--a
poor missionary priest--a man of the middle class--a young girl of a
great name and large fortune--a mechanic.

"Together, they comprise in themselves the virtues, the courage, the
degradation, the splendor, the miseries of our species!

"Siberia--India--America--France--behold the divers places where fate has
thrown them!

"My instinct teaches me when one of them is in peril. Then, from the
North to the South,