"I must first of all admit that its birth or, rather, its incarnation, its earliest idea, dawned on my mind in a less sudden and inspired and, consequently, less poetical, a manner than in his case. It did not strike me on the Pont des Arts, towards the evening of a beautiful summer day, at that hour when the ray of the western sun purples the horizon of the great city; it did not come to me, indeed, while I was gazing at the Mazarin Palace, vulgarly known as the Institut. That is why my _Tour de Nesle_ is so unacademic. No; but you will, perhaps, recollect the disastrous time when the cholera leapt from St. Petersburg to London, and from London to Paris, and fell upon the Hôtel-Dieu, spreading its wings over the doomed city like a black pall. The rich man in his selfishness, first of all, hoped that the plague-laden breath of this demon would restrict itself to a mortality among the poor; that the aristocratic scourge would only decimate the dwellers in lodgings or garrets, and that it would think twice before it knocked with its trailing shroud at the doors of the mansions of the opulent Chaussée or the noble Faubourg. He thought it had gone mad I He shut the padded shutters of his windows so that no sound should reach him; he ordered his valets to fight fresh candles, to bring in more bottles of wine, to sing more songs. Then, at the close of the orgy, he heard the shout at his door:--It was the Asiatic angel come, like the Commander after Don Juan's feast, to seize him by the hair, saying: 'Repent thee and die!' "Oh I then there was universal desolation, indeed I and it was curious to see how the rumour of the first cry of death from a rich household went resounding through the faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Luxembourg, and from the Luxembourg to la Nouvelle-Athènes; how, suddenly, all who lived encircled within that elegant triangle were stirred by a growing terror, and thought of nothing but flight, and shut themselves in their carriages emblazoned with the arms of Crécy, of Marengo or of the Bourse. More than one of these carriages, before it reached the end of the street, came into collision with a waggon covered with black on its way to the cemetery, and more than one fugitive met Death, the incorruptible Customs' officer, who forbade him to go beyond the frontier, recognising him as his, and having marked him for the tomb beforehand.