poplars in the meadows of Sainte-Claire.  Ah, how they used to run!  How well he remembered it!  She had learnt to swim in a fortnight.  She was a plucky girl.  She had only had one great fault:  she was inclined to pilfering.  But he would have cured her of that.  Then the thought of their first embraces brought him back to the narrow path.  They had always ended by returning to that nook.  He fancied he could hear the gipsy girl’s song dying away, the creaking of the last shutters, the solemn striking of the clocks.  Then the hour of separation came, and Miette climbed the wall again and threw him a kiss.  And he saw her no more.  Emotion choked him at the thought:  he would never see her again—­never!

“When you’re ready,” jeered the one-eyed man; “come, choose your place.”

Silvere took a few more steps.  He was approaching the end of the path, and could see nothing but a strip of sky in which the rust-coloured light was fading away.  Here had he spent his life for two years past.  The slow approach of death added an ineffable charm to this pathway which had so long served as a lovers’ walk.  He loitered, bidding a long and lingering farewell to all he loved; the grass, the timber, the stone of the old wall, all those things into which Miette had breathed life.  And again his thoughts wandered.  They were waiting till they should be old enough to marry:  Aunt Dide would remain with them.  Ah! if they had fled far away, very far away, to some unknown village, where the scamps of the Faubourg would no longer have been able to come and cast Chantegreil’s crime in his daughter’s face.  What peaceful bliss!  They would have opened a wheelwright’s workshop beside some high road.  No doubt, he cared little for his ambitions now; he no longer thought of coachmaking, of carriages with broad varnished panels as shiny as mirrors.  In the stupor of his despair he could not remember why his dream of bliss would never come to pass.  Why did he not go away with Miette and aunt Dide?  Then as he racked his memory, he heard the sharp crackling of a fusillade; he saw a standard fall before him, its staff broken and its folds drooping like the wings of a bird brought down by a shot.  It was the Republic falling asleep with Miette under the red flag.  Ah, what wretchedness!  They were both dead, both had bleeding wounds in their breasts.  And it was they—­the corpses of his two loves—­that now barred his path of life.  He had nothing left him and might well die himself.  These were the thoughts that had made him so gentle, so listless, so childlike all the way from Sainte-Roure.  The soldiers might have struck him, he would not have felt it.  His spirit no longer inhabited his body.  It was far away, prostrate beside the loved ones who were dead under the trees amidst the pungent smoke of the gunpowder.

But the one-eyed man was growing impatient; giving a push to Mourgue, who was lagging behind, he growled:  “Get along, do; I don’t want to be here all night.”