le in that of the courtesan as in that of the
Carmelite. This is what explains the word "virgin," accorded by the
Bible equally to the foolish virgin and to the wise virgin.

That was so yesterday, it is so to-day. Here again the surface has
changed, the bottom remains the same. The frank harshness of the Middle
Ages has been somewhat softened in our times. Ribald is pronounced
light o' love; Toinon answers to the name of Olympia or Imperia;
Thomasse-la-Maraude is called Mme. de Saint Alphonse. The caterpillar
was real, the butterfly is false; that is the only change. Clout has
become chiffon.

Regnier used to say "sows "; we say "fillies."

Other fashions; same manners.

The foolish virgin is lugubriously immutable.

III.

Whosoever witnesses this kind of anguish witnesses the extreme of human
misfortune.

Dark zones are these. Baleful night bursts and spreads o'er them. Evil
accumulated dissolves in misfortune upon them, they are swept with
blasts of despair by the tempest of fatalities, there a downpour of
trials and sorrows streams upon dishevelled heads in the darkness;
squalls, hail, a hurricane of distress, swirl and whirl back and forth
athwart them; it rains, rains without cease: it rains horror, it rains
vice, it rains crime, it rains the blackness of night; yet we must
explore this obscurity, and in the sombre storm the mind essays a
difficult flight, the flight of a wet bird, as it were.

There is always a vague, spectral dread in these low regions where
hell penetrates; they are so little in the human order and so
disproportionate that they create phantoms. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that a legend should be connected with this sinister bouquet
offered by Bicetre to La Salpetriere or by La Force to Saint Lazare; it
is related at night in the cells and wards after the keepers have gone
their rounds.

It was shortly after the murder of the money-changer Joseph. A bouquet
was sent from La Force to a woman's prison, Saint Lazare or the
Madelonnettes. In this bouquet was a sprig of white lilac which one of
the women prisoners selected.

A month or two elapsed; the woman was released from prison. She was
extremely enamoured, through the white lilac, of the unknown master she
had given to herself. She began to perform for him her strange function
of sister, mother, and mystic spouse, ignorant of his name, knowing only
his prison number. All her miserable savings, religiously deposite