by the way. How great was my misery, when begging as a miserable mendicant, exposed to the insults of the _gens d’armes_, I wandered about that wide wilderness of Paris, with the vague and eager hope of recovering Justine! Once—yes, once—I got a sight of her; only a single glance, but one I shall never forget. In a dashing carriage, the panels of which flashed in the sun with gilding and armorial bearings, she was seated by the side of De Mesmai, tricked out in all the gaudy and wanton finery that wealth and pride could bestow upon her. But she looked paler, less happy than she was wont to be, and the roses had faded from her cheek, and the lustre from her once sunny eye. They swept past me on the Boulevards, where I was seeking alms as was my wont, and Justine, _mon Dieu!_ my own fallen but kind-hearted daughter, threw a demi-franc into my tattered hat, without looking upon my face. I attempted to cry out; but what I would have said expired on my lips. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and when I recovered they were gone! I never beheld them again. "I was starving at that moment, monsieur; food had not passed my lips for three days, and I looked wistfully, till my eyes became blinded with tears, upon the little coin I had received from Justine. A sudden thought struck me. I spat upon it, and tossed it from me as a coin of hell, as the wages of her infamy. Twelve months,—long and weary months of wretchedness and sorrow, I wandered about the streets of Paris, a woe-begone mendicant, until all hope of seeing her again was extinguished, and I returned to Besançon more heart-broken, if possible, than when I had left it. My cottage had fallen into ruin; but honest Pierre Raoul restored me again to the occupation of gardener, and repaired my old residence for me. Our lord had been absent, no one knew where, ever since he had carried off Justine, and I began to have some faint hope that he might have married her. "These thoughts stole at length like sunshine into my desolate heart; and I thought so much of the chances and probabilities, that at last it appeared to me to be beyond a doubt that Justine was the wife of De Mesmai. I plucked up fresh courage, and attended from dawn till sunset my loaded orchards and blooming flower-beds as of old. The garden was again my delight and glory, and not even does the great Napoleon survey his troops with more delight, than I did my beds of tulips and anemonies: I had brought to perfection the art of cultivation, and where can it be practised with more success than under the climate of my own beautiful France? In the garden of the château the aloe of Africa, the pine of Scotland, the oak of England, the cypress of Candia, the laurels of Greece and Portugal, the rose-tree of Persia, the palms of India, the figs of Egypt—all blooming together, and at once.