bran had flowed out of it by a hole, but its porcelain head continued smiling with its enamelled lips, above the tabid body, which a doll's follies seemed to have exhausted. Renée felt stifled in the tainted atmosphere of the abode of her childhood. She opened the window and gazed on the immense view. Nothing there was soiled. She again found the eternal delights, the eternal juvenescence of the open air. The sun must have been sinking behind her; but she only saw the rays of the setting planet, as they lent, with infinite softness, a yellowish tinge to this corner of the city which she knew so well. It was like the last lay of daylight, a gay refrain, which slowly subsided on all things. There were gleams of tawny fire about the boom below, while the lace-work of the iron cables of the Pont de Constantine stood out above the whiteness of the pillars. Then, on the right hand, the umbrage of the Halle aux Vins and the Jardin des Plantes seemed like a great mere with stagnant, mossy water, the greenish surface of which blended in the distance with the mist of the sky. On the left, the Quai Henri IV. and the Quai de la Rapée were lined with the same rows of houses, those houses which, as girls, twenty years before, they had seen there, with the same brown patches of sheds, the same ruddy factory chimneys. And, above the trees, the slate roof of the Salpêtrière hospital, made blue by the sun's good-bye, suddenly appeared to her like an old friend. But what calmed her, and imparted coolness to her bosom, were the long grey banks, and especially the Seine, the giantess, which she saw coming from the limits of the horizon straight towards her, just as in those happy times when she had feared to see it well and rise up to the very window. She remembered their affection for the river, their love for its colossal flow, for this quivering of noisy water, spreading out in a sheet at their feet, parting around and behind them in two arms, the ends of which they could not see, though they still felt the great pure caress. They were then already coquettish, and on the days when the sky was clear they said that the Seine had put on her beautiful dress of green silk, flecked with white flames; and the eddies where the water curled set frills of satin on the dress, while afar off, beyond the belt of bridges, a play of light spread strips of stuff the colour of the sun.