stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their
regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black
letters, epigrams reproving the curious, _concetti_, wittily turned
farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious
biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus,
there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few
cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of
art,--Moorish, Greek, Gothic,--friezes, ovules, paintings, vases,
guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable _immortelles_, and
dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy! It is another Paris, with its
streets, its signs, its industries, and its lodgings; but a Paris seen
through the diminishing end of an opera-glass, a microscopic Paris
reduced to the littleness of shadows, spectres, dead men, a human race
which no longer has anything great about it, except its vanity. There
Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the
slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre,
the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which
the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a
constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to
the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the
gilded cupola of the Invalides:--

"She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world
which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and occupation."

Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a
modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin the
middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a death
scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps, with no
accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches, without prayers
of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity. Here are the facts:
The body of a young girl was found early in the morning, stranded on the
river-bank in the slime and reeds of the Seine. Men employed in dredging
sand saw it as they were getting into their frail boat on their way to
their work.

"_Tiens_! fifty francs earned!" said one of them.

"True," said the other.

They approached the body.

"A handsome girl! We had better go and make our statement."

And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went
to the