d her out, after throwing five francs onto one
of the chairs.

As soon as they were outside the gate, she began to sob, and said,
shaking with grief:

"Oh! oh! is that what you have made of him?"

He was very pale, and replied coldly:

"I did what I could. His farm is worth eighty thousand francs, and that
is more than most of the children of the middle classes have."

They returned slowly, without speaking a word. She was still crying; the
tears ran down her cheeks continually for a time, but by degrees they
stopped, and they went back to Fecamp, where they found Monsieur de
Cadour waiting dinner for them, and as soon as he saw them, he began to
laugh, and exclaimed:

"So my wife has had a sunstroke, and I am very glad of it. I really
think she has lost her head for some time past!"

Neither of them replied, and when the husband asked them rubbing his
hands:

"Well, I hope that at least you have had a pleasant walk?"

Monsieur d'Apreval replied:

"A delightful walk, I assure you; perfectly delightful."

A NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL

My friend Ledantec and I were twenty-five and we had come to London for
the first time in our lives. It was a Saturday evening in December, cold
and foggy, and I think that all that combined is more than enough to
explain why my friend Ledantec and I were most abominably drunk, though,
to tell the truth, we did not feel any discomfort from it. On the
contrary, we were floating in an atmosphere of perfect bliss. We did not
speak, certainly, for we were incapable of doing so, but then we had no
inclination for conversation. What would be the good of it? We could so
easily read all our thoughts in each others eyes! And all our thoughts
consisted in the sweet and unique knowledge, that we were thinking about
nothing whatever.

It was not, however, in order to arrive at that state of delicious,
intellectual nihility, thai we had gone to mysterious Whitechapel. We
had gone into the first public-house we saw, with the firm intention of
studying manners and customs,--not to mention morals,--there as
spectators, artists and philosophers, but in the second public-house we
entered, we ourselves became like the objects of our investigations,
that is to say, sponges soaked in alcohol. Between one public-house and
the other, the outer air seemed to squeeze those sponges, which then got
just as dry as before, and thus we rolled from public-house to
public-house, until at last the sponge