Jacquet finally succeeded in getting him to leave the great enclosure, divided like a chessboard by iron railings and elegant compartments, in which were tombs decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as cold as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their regrets and coats of arms.  Many good words are there engraved in black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, concetti, wittily turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel.  Here the floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of art,—­Moorish, Greek, Gothic,—­friezes, ovules, paintings, vases, guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable immortelles, and dead rose-bushes.  It is a forlorn comedy!  It is another Paris, with its streets, its signs, its industries, and its lodgings; but a Paris seen through the diminishing end of an opera-glass, a microscopic Paris reduced to the littleness of shadows, spectres, dead men, a human race which no longer has anything great about it, except its vanity.  There Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous.  He glanced with a constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the gilded cupola of the Invalides:—­

“She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and occupation.”

Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin the middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a death scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps, with no accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches, without prayers of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity.  Here are the facts:  The body of a young girl was found early in the morning, stranded on the river-bank in the slime and reeds of the Seine.  Men employed in dredging sand saw it as they were getting into their frail boat on their way to their work.

“Tiens! fifty francs earned!” said one of them.

“True,” said the other.

They approached the body.

“A handsome girl!  We had better go and make our statement.”

And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went to the house of the village mayor, who was much embarrassed at having to make out the legal papers necessitated by this discovery.