carriage, allowed himself
to be almost carried away by jealousy of his friend, Amedee, detained by
the charm of this beautiful day which is drawing to a close, walks with
slow, lingering steps under the lindens on the terrace.

The leaves are falling around him!

A very slight breeze is rising, the blue sky is fading a little below;
in the nearest Paris suburb the windows are shining in the oblique rays
of the setting sun. It will soon be night, and upon this carpet of dead
leaves, which crackle under the poet's tread, other leaves will fall.
They fall rarely, slowly, but continually. The frost of the night before
has blighted them all. Dried up and rusty, they barely hang to the
trees, so that the slightest wind that passes over them gathers them one
after another, detaching them from their branches; whirling an instant
in the golden light, they at last rejoin, with a sad little sound, their
withered sisters, who sprinkle the gravel walks. The leaves fall, the
leaves fall!

Amedee Violette is filled with melancholy.

He ought to be happy. What can he reproach destiny with? Has he not the
one he always desired for his wife? Is she not the sweetest and best of
companions for him? Yes! but he knows very well that she consented to
marry him in order to obey Maurice's last wish, he knows very well that
Maria's heart is buried in the soldier's grave at Champigny. She has set
apart a sanctuary within herself where burns, as a perpetual light,
the remembrance of the adored dead, of the man to whom she gave herself
without reserve, the father of her son, the hero who tore himself from
her arms to shed his blood for his country.

Amedee may be certain of the gratitude and devotion of his wife, but he
never will have her love, for Maurice, a posthumous rival, rises between
them. Ah, this Maurice! He had loved Maria very little or not very
faithfully! She should remember that he had first betrayed her, that but
for Amedee he would have abandoned her and she never would have been his
wife. If she knew that in Paris when she was far away he had deceived
her! But she never would know anything of it, for Amedee has too much
delicacy to hurt the memory of the dead, and he respects and even
admires this fidelity of illusion and love in Maria. He suffers from
it. The one to whom he has given his name, his heart, and his life, is
inconsolable, and he must be resigned to it. Although remarried, she is
a widow at the bottom of her hea