dazzling, who was laughing and playing
with a charming child of sixteen months, buried in ribbons, lace and
furs.

This woman did not see the terrible man who was gazing at her.

I became pensive.

This man was no longer a man for me; he was the spectre of misery,
the brusque, deformed, lugubrious apparition in full daylight, in full
sunlight, of a revolution that is still plunged in darkness, but which
is approaching. In former times the poor jostled the rich, this spectre
encountered the rich man in all his glory; but they did not look at each
other, they passed on. This condition of things could thus last for some
time. The moment this man perceives that this woman exists, while
this woman does not see that this man is there, the catastrophe is
inevitable.

GENERAL FABVIER

Fabvier had fought valiantly in the wars of the Empire; he fell out
with the Restoration over the obscure affair of Grenoble. He expatriated
himself about 1816. It was the period of the departure of the eagles.
Lallemand went to America, Allard and Vannova to India, Fabvier to
Greece.

The revolution of 1820 broke out. He took an heroic part in it. He
raised a corps of four thousand palikars, to whom he was not a chief,
but a god. He gave them civilization and taught them barbarity. He was
rough and brave above all of them, and almost ferocious, but with that
grand, Homeric ferocity. One might have thought that he had come from a
tent of the camp of Achilles rather than from the camp of Napoleon. He
invited the English Ambassador to dinner at his bivouac; the Ambassador
found him seated by a big fire at which a whole sheep was roasting; when
the animal was cooked and unskewered, Fabvier placed the heel of his
bare foot upon the neck of the smoking and bleeding sheep and tore off
a quarter, which he offered to the Ambassador. In bad times nothing
daunted him. He was indifferent alike to cold, heat, fatigue and hunger;
he never spared himself. The palikars used to say: "When the soldier
eats cooked grass Fabvier eats it green."

I knew his history, but I had not seen him when, in 1846, General
Fabvier was made a peer of France. One day he had a speech to make, and
the Chancellor announced: "Baron Fabvier has the tribune." I expected to
hear a lion, I thought an old woman was speaking.

Yet his face was a truly masculine one, heroic and formidable, that one
might have fancied had been moulded by the hand of a giant and which
se