Jeanne, with her sleeves soaked, was seized with a fit of coughing.  But she was unconscious of the chill that was penetrating her; she was now absorbed in the thought that her mother had gone into Paris.  She had come at last to know three buildings—­the Invalides, the Pantheon, and the Tower of St.-Jacques.  She now slowly went over their names, and pointed them out with her finger without attempting to think what they might be like were she nearer to them.  Without doubt, however, her mother was down there; and she settled in her mind that she was in the Pantheon, because it astonished her the most, huge as it was, towering up through the air, like the city’s head-piece.  Then she began to question herself.  Paris was still to her the place where children never go; she was never taken there.  She would have liked to know it, however, that she might have quietly said to herself:  “Mamma is there; she is doing such and such a thing.”  But it all seemed to her too immense; it was impossible to find any one there.  Then her glance travelled towards the other end of the plain.  Might her mother not rather be in one of that cluster of houses on the hill to the left? or nearer in, beneath those huge trees, whose bare branches seemed as dead as firewood?  Oh! if she could only have lifted up the roofs!  What could that gloomy edifice be?  What was that street along which something of enormous bulk seemed to be running?  And what could that district be at sight of which she always felt frightened, convinced as she was that people fought one another there?  She could not see it distinctly, but, to tell the truth, its aspects stirred one; it was very ugly, and must not be looked at by little girls.

A host of indefinable ideas and suppositions, which brought her to the verge of weeping, awoke trouble in Jeanne’s ignorant, childish mind.  From the unknown world of Paris, with its smoke, its endless noises, its powerful, surging life, an odor of wretchedness, filth, and crime seemed to be wafted to her through the mild, humid atmosphere, and she was forced to avert her head, as though she had been leaning over one of those pestilential pits which breathe forth suffocation from their unseen horrors.  The Invalides, the Pantheon, the Tower of Saint-Jacques—­these she named and counted; but she knew nothing of anything else, and she sat there, terrified and ashamed, with the all-absorbing thought that her mother was among those wicked places, at some spot which she was unable to identify in the depths yonder.

Suddenly Jeanne turned round.  She could have sworn that somebody had walked into the bedroom, that a light hand had even touched her shoulder.  But the room was empty, still in the same disorder as when Helene had left.  The dressing-gown, flung across the pillow, still lay in the same mournful, weeping attitude.  Then Jeanne, with pallid cheeks, cast a glance around, and her heart nearly burst within her.  She was alone! she was alone!  And,