When night falls the Aire Saint-Mittre loses its animation, and looks like some great black hole.  At the far end one may just espy the dying embers of the gipsies’ fires, and at times shadows slink noiselessly into the dense darkness.  The place becomes quite sinister, particularly in winter time.

One Sunday evening, at about seven o’clock, a young man stepped lightly from the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and, closely skirting the walls, took his way among the timber in the wood-yard.  It was in the early part of December, 1851.  The weather was dry and cold.  The full moon shone with that sharp brilliancy peculiar to winter moons.  The wood-yard did not have the forbidding appearance which it wears on rainy nights; illumined by stretches of white light, and wrapped in deep and chilly silence, it spread around with a soft, melancholy aspect.

For a few seconds the young man paused on the edge of the yard and gazed mistrustfully in front of him.  He carried a long gun, the butt-end of which was hidden under his jacket, while the barrel, pointed towards the ground, glittered in the moonlight.  Pressing the weapon to his side, he attentively examined the square shadows cast by the piles of timber.  The ground looked like a chess-board, with black and white squares clearly defined by alternate patches of light and shade.  The sawyers’ tressels in the centre of the plot threw long, narrow fantastic shadows, suggesting some huge geometrical figure, upon a strip of bare grey ground.  The rest of the yard, the flooring of beams, formed a great couch on which the light reposed, streaked here and there with the slender black shadows which edged the different pieces of timber.  In the frigid silence under the wintry moon, the motionless, recumbent poles, stiffened, as it were, with sleep and cold, recalled the corpses of the old cemetery.  The young man cast but a rapid glance round the empty space; there was not a creature, not a sound, no danger of being seen or heard.  The black patches at the further end caused him more anxiety, but after a brief examination he plucked up courage and hurriedly crossed the wood-yard.

As soon as he felt himself under cover he slackened his pace.  He was now in the green pathway skirting the wall behind the piles of planks.  Here his very footsteps became inaudible; the frozen grass scarcely crackled under his tread.  He must have loved the spot, have feared no danger, sought nothing but what was pleasant there.  He no longer concealed his gun.  The path stretched away like a dark trench, except that the moonrays, gliding ever and anon between the piles of timber, then streaked the grass with patches of light.  All slept, both darkness and light, with the same deep, soft, sad slumber.  No words can describe the calm peacefulness of the place.  The young man went right down the path, and stopped at the end where the walls of the Jas-Meiffren form an angle.  Here he listened as if to ascertain whether any sound might be coming from the adjoining estate.  At last, hearing nothing, he stooped down, thrust a plank aside, and hid his gun in a timber-stack.