y, like a dead leaf--Veron,
who revolves, when he may, round Antonia. An ungainly man, whose tiny
head leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a few
rents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes he
is overcome by attacks of compassion.

Veron and Louise Verte see one another,--and each makes a detour of
avoidance. They are afraid of each other.

Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Boneas, very
compassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between the
turned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief,--thick as a
towel,--a mournful yellow face is stuck.

I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! I
feel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, wavering
like ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete.

Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows stand
sharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that Marie
Tusson lives, whose father, a clerk at Messrs. Gozlan's, like myself,
is manager of the property. I steered to this place instinctively,
without confessing it to myself, brushing people and things without
mingling with them.

Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just say
good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.

I lean against a plane tree and think of Marie. She is tall, fair,
strong and amiable, and she goes modestly clad, like a wide-hipped
Venus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes.

To know her so near agitates me among the shadows. If she appeared
before me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of the
dark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of her
figure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand in
hers,--I should tremble.

But that does not happen. The bluish, cold background only shows me
the two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which one
is, perhaps, she herself. But they take no sort of shape, and remain
in another world.

At last my eyes leave that constellation of windows among the trees,
that vertical and silent firmament. Then I make for my home, in this
evening which comes at the end of all the days I have lived.

* * * * * *

Little Antoinette,--how comes it that they leave her all alone like
this?--is standing in my path and holding a hand out towards me. It is
her way that she is begging fo