amid the thousand lights of windows, lamps, shops, carriages, and
_cafés_, and among all those avenues of fixed or wandering fires which
illumine at night the buildings and the horizon of Paris. All other
illuminations no longer existed for me,--there was no other light on
earth, no other star in the firmament but that small window, which
seemed like an open eye seeking me out in darkness, and on which my
eyes, my thoughts, my soul, were ever and solely bent. O
incomprehensible power of the infinite nature of man, which can fill
the universal space and think it too confined; or can be concentrated
in one bright speck shining through the river mists, amid the ocean of
fires of a vast city, and feel its desires, feelings, intelligence, and
love bounded by that small spark which scarce outshines the glowworm of
a summer's evening! How often have I thus thought as I paced the
bridge, muffled in my cloak! How often have I exclaimed, as I gazed at
that oval window shining in the distance: Let all the fires of earth be
quenched, let all the luminous globes of the firmament be extinguished,
but may that feeble light--the mysterious star of our two lives--shine
on forever; its glimmering would illumine countless worlds, and suffice
my eyes through all eternity!

Alas, since then I have seen this star of my youth expire, this burning
focus of my eyes and heart extinguished! I have seen the shutters of
the window closed for many a long year on the funereal darkness of that
little room. One year, one day, I saw them once more opened. I looked
to see who dared to live where she had lived before; and then I saw, in
summer time, at that same window, bathed in sunshine and adorned with
flowers, a young woman whom I did not know playing and smiling with a
new-born child, unconscious that she played upon a grave, that her
smiles were turned to tears in the eyes of a passer-by, and that so
much life seemed as a mockery of death.... Since then, at night, I have