aise toward
the Avricourt station. "If I have a son, I wish he may find me!"

CHAPTER XIX.

HE SEEKS AND BESTOWS THE HAND OF CLEMENTINE.

On the fifth of September, at ten o'clock in the morning, Leon Renault,
emaciated, dejected and scarcely recognizable, was at the feet of
Clementine Sambucco in her aunt's parlor. There were flowers on the
mantel and flowers in all the vases. Two great burglar sunbeams broke
through the open windows. A million of little bluish atoms were playing
in the light, crossing each other and getting fantastically mixed up,
like the ideas in a volume of M. Alfred Houssaye. In the garden, the
apples were falling, the peaches were ripe, the hornets were ploughing
broad, deep furrows in the _duchesse_ pears; the trumpet-flowers and
clematis-vines were in blossom, and to crown all, a great mass of
heliotropes, trained over the left window, was flourishing in all its
beauty. The sun had given all the grapes in the arbor a tint of golden
bronze; and the great Yucca on the lawn, shaken by the wind like a
Chinese hat, noiselessly clashed its silver bells. But the son of M.
Renault was more pale and haggard than the white lilac sprays, more
blighted than the leaves on the old cherry-tree; his heart was without
joy and without hope, like the currant bushes without leaves and without
fruit!

To be exiled from his native land, to have lived three years in an
inhospitable climate, to have passed so many days in deep mines, so many
nights over an earthenware stove in the midst of an infinity of bugs and
a multiplicity of serfs, and to see himself set aside for a
twenty-five-louis Colonel whom he himself had brought to life by soaking
him in water!

All men are subject to disappointments, but surely never had one
encountered a misfortune so unforeseen and so extraordinary. Leon knew
that Earth is not a valley flowing with chocolate and soup _a la reine_.
He knew the list of the renowned unfortunates beginning with Abel slain
in the garden of Paradise, and ending with Rubens assassinated in the
gallery of the Louvre at Paris. But history, which seldom instructs us,
never consoles us. The poor engineer in vain repeated to himself that a
thousand others had been supplanted on the day before marriage, and a
hundred thousand on the day after. Melancholy was stronger than Reason,
and three or four soft locks were beginning to whiten about his temples.

"Clementine!" said he, "I am the most miserable