lower has done all this. What a well is the human heart, and how
giddy it makes one to peer into it! Lo! the cloaca. Of what is it
thinking? Of perfume. A prostitute loves a thief through a lily. What
plunger into human thought could reach the bottom of this? Who shall
fathom this immense yearning for flowers that springs from mud? In
the secret self of these hapless women is a strange equilibrium that
consoles and reassures them. A rose counterbalances an act of shame.

Hence these amours based on and sustained by illusion. This thief is
idolized by this girl. She has not seen his face, she does not know his
name; she sees him in visions induced by the perfume of jessamine or of
pinks. Henceforward flower-gardens, the May sunshine, the birds in their
nests, exquisite tints, radiant blossoms, boxes of orange trees and
daphne odora, velvet petals upon which golden bees alight, the sacred
odours of spring-tide, balms, incense, purling brooks, and soft green
grass are associated with this bandit. The divine smile of nature
penetrates and illumines him.

This desperate aspiring to paradise lost, this deformed dream of the
beautiful, is not less tenacious on the part of the man. He turns
towards the woman; and this preoccupation, become insensate, persists
even when the dreadful shadow of the two red posts of the guillotine
is thrown upon the window of his cell. The day before his execution
Delaporte, chief of the Trappes band, who was wearing the strait-jacket,
asked of the convict Cogniard, whom, through the grating in the door of
the condemned cell, he saw passing by: "Are there any pretty women in
the visitors' parlor this morning?" Another condemned man, Avril (what
a name!), in this same cell, bequeathed all that he possessed--five
francs--to a female prisoner whom he had seen at a distance in the
women's yard, "in order that she may buy herself a fichu a la mode."

Between the male and female wretch dreams build a Bridge of Sighs, as it
were. The mire of the gutter dallies with the door of a prison cell. The
Aspasia of the street-corner aspires and respires with the heart of the
Alcibiades who waylays the passer-by at the corner of a wood.

You laugh? You should not. It is a terrible thing.

II.

The murderer is a flower for the courtesan. The prostitute is the Clytia
of the assassin sun. The eye of the woman damned languourously seeks
Satan among the myrtles.

What is this phenomenon? It is the need