PART THIRD.--THE REDEMPTION.



CHAPTER I.

THE WANDERING JEW'S CHASTISEMENT.

'Tis night--the moon is brightly shining, the brilliant stars are
sparkling in a sky of melancholy calmness, the shrill whistlings of a
northerly wind--cold, bleak, and evil-bearing--are increasing: winding
about, and bursting into violent blasts, with their harsh and hissing
gusts, they are sweeping the heights of Montmartre. A man is standing on
the very summit of the hill; his lengthened shadow, thrown out by the
moon's pale beams, darkens the rocky ground in the distance. The
traveller is surveying the huge city lying at his feet--the City of
Paris--from whose profundities are cast up its towers, cupolas, domes,
and steeples, in the bluish moisture of the horizon; while from the very
centre of this sea of stones is rising a luminous vapor, reddening the
starry azure of the sky above. It is the distant light of a myriad lamps
which at night, the season for pleasure, is illuminating the noisy
capital.

"No!" said the traveller, "it will not be. The Lord surely will not
suffer it. Twice is quite enough. Five centuries ago, the avenging hand
of the Almighty drove me hither from the depths of Asia. A solitary
wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death,
than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could
have produced. I then entered this city, and it was decimated. Two
centuries ago that inexorable hand which led me through the world again