The nightingale had ceased to sing. It was sleeping on its young brood. All was still, and the young zephyr (the night breeze of those days) was slumbering so sweetly that it did not even stir a blade of grass. Paris too was asleep, at all events the tranquil quarter of which the hôtel D'Estrelle marked the outer limit. The sounds of the country were more audible there than those of the city; at that hour they were confined to an occasional cock-crow and the barking of a dog in the distance at long intervals. The clocks rang out in clear tones, answering one another from convent to convent; then everything relapsed into blissful silence; and if one could hear the distant rumbling of a carriage on the pavement of the real Paris, it resembled the dull murmur of the waves rather than a sound produced by human activity. Julie, tired out and slightly bewildered, breathed deep of the tranquillity of the night, of that perfume of solitude, with the keenest pleasure. She fixed her eyes on a great white star, which shone near the moon and was reflected in the same basin. At first she sat there without thinking, oblivious of everything, enjoying absolute repose; soon her heart began to beat so violently that it pained her; first she felt hot, then cold. She rose to go away. She went to her bedroom window, but she did not knock. She returned to the stone bench. She sat down and wept. Then she rose and walked around the basin like a soul in torment; at last she stopped, smiling like a soul at peace. She consented to question herself, and when her heart replied: _I love_, she was frightened and forbade it to speak. Then she called her conscience to account for that terror, that shrinking austerity, opposed to the laws of nature and useless to God. Her conscience replied that it had nothing to do with it, and that the obstacle was not due to it but to the _reason_, a sort of artificial conscience wherein God and nature gave precedence to conventional ideas, fear, selfish scheming, precautions due to misapprehension of one's real interests. In this order of reasoning everything was expressed in terms of six-franc pieces. Marcel had reason on his side in view of the actual facts. So the heart must be sacrificed to the most sordid of facts, to the implacable menace of poverty. "No," said Julie to herself, "that shall not be! If necessary I will sell everything, I will have nothing of my own, I will work; but I _will_ love, even though I have to ask alms! Besides, _he_ will work for three, he who works now for two! He will undertake that burden, he will be overjoyed to do it if he loves me! In his place, I should be so overjoyed!" Julie began to walk again with increasing agitation.