never succeeded in anything because he believed too much in the impossible. Why should it be astonishing? He was always conceiving the impossible.

Samuel, one evening, hit on the idea of going out; it was beautiful, scented weather. He had, in accordance with his natural taste for the excessive, equally violent and prolonged habits of seclusion and dissipation, and for a long time he had remained faithful to his house. The maternal laziness, the Creole love of doing nothing which flowed in his veins prevented him from finding anything intolerable in the disorder of his room, his linen, and his greasy, excessively tangled hair. He combed it, washed himself, managed in a few moments to recover the dress and aplomb of people for whom elegance is an everyday affair; then he opened the window. The warm golden light rushed into the dusty study. Samuel was astonished to see how quickly and noiselessly spring had come. A mild air, impregnated with sweet odours, made his nostrils twitch. One part of it mounting to his brain filled him with dreaminess and desires, the other naughtily stirred his heart, his stomach and his liver. Resolutely, he blew out his two candles, one of which was still palpitating on a volume of Swedenborg, and the other flickered out on one of those shameful books the reading of which is profitable only to minds possessed of an immoderate taste for truth.

From the height of his solitude, cluttered with documents, paved with old books and peopled with his dreams, Samuel often observed whilst walking in an allée of the Luxembourg, a face and form which he had loved in the provinces, at an age when one really loves. Her features, though matured and blunted by some years of use, had the profound and decent grace of the respectable woman; in the depths of her eyes there still shone occasionally a humid, virginal dreaminess. She used to come and go, always escorted by quite a smart maid, whose face and demeanour revealed the confidante and companion rather than the servant. She seemed to seek out the deserted spots, and used to sit down sadly in widow-like attitudes, absently holding in her hand a book which she did not read.

Samuel had known her in the neighbourhood of Lyons, when she was young, alert, sprightly and thinner. By dint of watching her, and so to speak recognizing her, he had revived one by one all the tiny memories which attracted him to her in his imagination: he had recounted to himself, detail by detail, the whole of this youthful romance, which since that time had lost itself in the preoccupations of his life and in the labyrinth of his passions.

On that particular evening he raised his hat to her with more care and ceremony. Passing in front of her he heard behind him this snatch of dialogue.

‘What do you think of that young man, Mariette?’

But this was said in such an absent-minded tone that the most malicious observer could have found no fault with the lady.

‘Oh, I think he is very nice, madame. Madame knows that it is M. Samuel Cramer?’

And more severely:

‘Now how do you happen to know that, Mariette?’

That is why next day Samuel took great care to bring her back her handkerchief and her book, which he found on a bench, and which she had not lost, since she was close at hand watching the sparrows squabbling for crumbs, or seeming to contemplate the inner workings of the vegetation. As often happens between two beings whose souls by a complicity of destiny have been brought into tune with one another, opening the conversation rather abruptly, he had, nevertheless, the good fortune to find a person disposed to listen and to reply to him.

‘Is it possible, madame, that I am fortunate enough to be still esconced in a corner of your memory? Have I changed so much that you cannot recognize in me a comrade of your childhood with whom you deigned to play at hide-and-seek, and to play truant?’