A flower has done all this. What a well is the human
heart, and how giddy it makes one to peer into it! Lo!
the cloaca. Of what is it thinking? Of perfume. A
prostitute loves a thief through a lily. What plunger into
human thought could reach the bottom of this? Who shall
fathom this immense yearning for flowers that springs from
mud? In the secret self of these hapless women is a
strange equilibrium that consoles and reassures them. A
rose counterbalances an act of shame.

Hence these amours based on and sustained by illusion.
This thief is idolized by this girl. She has not seen his face,
she does not know his name; she sees him in visions induced
by the perfume of jessamine or of pinks. Henceforward
flower-gardens, the May sunshine, the birds in their nests,
exquisite tints, radiant blossoms, boxes of orange trees and
daphne odora, velvet petals upon which golden bees alight,
the sacred odours of spring-tide, balms, incense, purling
brooks, and soft green grass are associated with this bandit.
The divine smile of nature penetrates and illumines him.

This desperate aspiring to paradise lost, this deformed
dream of the beautiful, is not less tenacious on the part of
the man. He turns towards the woman; and this preoccupation,
become insensate, persists even when the dreadful
shadow of the two red posts of the guillotine is thrown
upon the window of his cell. The day before his execution
Delaporte, chief of the Trappes band, who was wearing
the strait-jacket, asked of the convict Cogniard, whom,