In the street I stood for a moment as if stunned. I looked about for love's recruiting-agents, for the round back and black costume of "Mme. Rebecca Ranvet, Millinery." Ah! if I had seen her, I would have gone to her, I would have delivered myself to her. But there was no such person there. The people passing were busy and indifferent, and paid no attention to my distress. Then I stopped at a wine-shop, where I bought a bottle of brandy, and, after strolling about for a while, still stupid and with heavy head, I went back to my hotel. Toward evening, late, I heard a knock at my door. I lay stretched upon my bed, half naked, stupefied by drink. "Who is there?" I cried. "It is I." "Who are you?" "The waiter." I rose, with my loosened hair falling from my shoulders, and opened the door. "What do you want?" The waiter smiled. He was a tall fellow with red hair, whom I had met several times on the stairs, and who always looked at me strangely. "What do you want?" I repeated. The waiter smiled again, apparently embarrassed, and, rolling in his fat fingers the bottom of his blue apron, covered with grease spots, he stammered: "Mam'zelle ... I...." He surveyed my person with a sort of dismal desire. "Well, come in, you brute," I cried, suddenly. And pushing him into my room, I closed the door again, violently. Oh! misery me! The waiter was discharged. I never knew his name! I should not like to leave the subject of Mme. Paulhat-Durand's employment-bureau, without giving my recollection of a poor devil whom I met there. He was a gardener, who had been a widower for four months, and who was looking for a place. Among the many lamentable faces that passed through the bureau I saw none as sad as his, none that seemed to me more overwhelmed by life. His wife had died of a miscarriage ... of a miscarriage?... the night before the day when, after two months of poverty, they were at last to take positions on an estate,--he in charge of the garden, she in charge of the barn-yard. Whether from ill-luck, or from weariness and from disgust of life, he had found nothing since this great misfortune; he had not even looked for anything. And during this period of idleness his little savings had quickly melted away. Although he was very suspicious, I succeeded in taming him a little. I put into the form of an impersonal narrative the simple and poignant tragedy that he related to me one day when I, greatly moved by his misfortune, had shown more interest and pity than usual. Here it is.