The Red Lily

llers in long cloaks came and went. At the end of the station, blinding with soot and dust, a small rainbow could be discerned, not larger than one's hand. Countess Martin and the good Mad

tty gayety and naive joy. She had promised herself much pleasure in travelling with a man of genius, original, picturesquely ugly, with an amusing simplicity; like a child prematurely old and abandoned, full of vices, yet with a certain degree of

Monsieur Choul

ined in his yellow, hollow face, so vividly did this old man express the eternal adolescence of the poet and artist. When she saw him, Therese regretted having invited so strange a companion. He walked along, throwing a hasty glance into every carriage - a glance which, little by little,

veloped with gray cloth, beside which it looked conspicuously sordi

complimented Madame Martin on the

ss at Saint Severin, my parish, in the Virgin Chapel, under those pretty, but absurd co

e Martin, "you a

ordon of the order which he was foundin

lieved so wretched a story. My ribbon, Madame, is a symbolical ribbon. It is represented by a simple thread, which one wears under one's clothes after a pauper has touched it, as a sign that poverty is holy, and that it will

to the horri

priest gave to me, the works of Monsieur de

ittle ill at ease. But the good Madame

pieces of paper on which he noted at the coffeehouse his ideas for poems, nor the dozen of flattering letters which, soiled and spotted, he carried with him continually, to read them to his newly-made companions at night. After assuring himself that nothing was missing, he took from the book a letter folded in an open envelope. He waved it for a while, with an air of mysterious impudence,

and sometimes longer. The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white stockings, which fell around her heels

with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figu

vagabonds. I know how to open locks with a

ar. It was the head of

d of mingled harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of ugliness created by the free-thinking bourgeois

oil to be killed. Nowadays it is a duty for a poor peasant to be a soldier. He is exiled from his house, the roof of which smokes in the silence of night; from the fat prairies where the oxen graze; from the fields and the paternal woods. He is taught how to kill men; he is threatened, insulted, put in prison and told that it is an honor; and, if he does not care for that sort of honor, he is fusilladed. He obeys because he is terrorized, and is of all domestic animals the gentlest and most docile. We are warlike in France, and we are citizens. Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen! For the poor it consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and their laziness. The poor must work for this, in presence of the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridg

e wintry sunlight passed fields of brown earth, trees despoi

rness at the figure

weeping, stupid with shame and misery, as you were

cked the army. Madame Martin saw in this only an amusing fantasy. Choulette's ideas did not frighten her. She was afraid o

re to-day, selfish, avaricious, and pitiless. I believe that l

e dining-car, and left Choulette in it, alone with h

kept, and never shown to any one. He was lively and very gay. One would not have thought it who had seen him later, tired by work and weakened by illness. He studied until t

u have kept the reminiscence of them; tha

sighed; a cloud passe

this horrible passion made him unjust, ironical, and violent. I can assure you that my behavior gave not the least cause for suspicion. I was not a coquette. But I was young, fresh; I passed for beautiful. That was e

dame Marmet add

But I had to renounce going to ba

iculous, between his wife, plump, white, and amiable, and the skeleton wearing a helmet of bronze and gold. But the excellent widow con

te, a mark of confidence, or was it that he did not love her enough to make her suffer? She did not know, and she did

ured car

d when we are loved we a

e by little with its gray clouds the mulberry-trees of the Dauphine. Madame Marmet went to sl

since she lik

of hills pass, Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the

ped in red wool and a fur cap, he almost frightened her. It was what he wished to do. His violent attitud

was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while seeing the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of tho

o rows on the road that leads to the church. They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at night. One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had die

d Choulette shivered in the cold of the ni