When they were all seated near the fire in a fisherman’s hut, they looked round for the man who had brought them safely out of the sea. But he was not there, having gone down to the water to rescue the skipper, who had been washed ashore. He carried him to the door of the hut, and when the door of the humble refuge was opened, the Saviour disappeared--for it was He. And so on this spot the convent of Mercy was built, as a shelter for storm-beleaguered sailors, and it was said by humble folk that for many years the foot-prints of Jesus Christ could be seen there in the sands of Flanders. * * * * * There is little charm in Balzac’s work, much coarseness, much detail of vileness, much to cause the sensitive to shudder; but there is much, too, that causes the soul to judge itself honestly, and many a beauty-crowned peak rising nobly from the valley darkness. In the story which here follows in full, in translation, appear all of Balzac’s characteristic traits. Happily, its theme leads us above the sordid and the filthy, up to the heights which he knew and sometimes extolled. “An Episode Under the Terror,” which Ferdinand Brunetière has pronounced to be “in its artistic brevity one of Balzac’s most tragic and finished narratives,” was written in 1830 as an introduction to the fictitious Memoirs of Sanson, who is the Stranger referred to in the story. AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR (_UN ÉPISODE SOUS LA TERREUR_) By Honoré de Balzac _Done into English by the Editor_ On the twenty-second of January, 1793, about eight o’clock in the evening, an old lady was walking down the steep hill that ends in front of the church of Saint Laurent, in the Faubourg Saint Martin in Paris. It had snowed so much throughout the day that foot-falls could scarcely be heard. The streets were deserted. The very natural dread inspired by the silence was augmented by all the terror which at that time caused France to groan; then, too, the old lady had not as yet met any one; her sight had long been feeble, so for this and for other reasons she could not discern by the lights of the lanterns the few distant passers-by, who were scattered like phantoms on the broad highway of the quarter. She went on courageously alone through that solitude, as though her age were a talisman which would preserve her from all evil.