With these words he rose and left, after thanking the portress, who would have been extremely astonished had she been aware of the reflections that had just been occupying his mind.  He went a short distance on the highway, then finding, to the right, a road that led to Cormeilles, he took it, but soon struck into a path that wound through the woods.  He was sorry to leave a spot that spoke vividly to his heart, and even more so to his imagination.  He seated himself on the turf, in the midst of a grove of oaks; around him stretched a blooming heath.  Through an opening in the grove, he could see Saint-Germain, its forests, and the Seine glittering in the sunshine, with the two bridges of Maisons Lafitte spanning it with their arches.  Through another opening he caught a glimpse, to his left, of the proud bastions of Mont-Valerien, and, in the distance, Paris, the Arc de l’Etoile, the gilt dome of the Invalides, and the smoke of the factories rising slowly in the air, then by turns remaining stiff and motionless, or being swept away by the wind.

The place was retired, solitary, very still.  No sound was to be heard save the singing of a lark, and at intervals the melancholy cry of a peacock.  Abel Larinski was overcome by a mysterious emotion; he felt a voluptuous languor steal through his veins.  He watched the smoke over Paris, and he saw floating in it an ethereal form whose face was partly concealed by a red hood.  It smiled on him, and he read in this smile a promise of all the joys of the land of Canaan.

He turned away his eyes, partially closing them, and there appeared another form to him—­in truth, very different from the first.  It was that of a man whom he had known intimately, of a man whom he had deeply loved.  In vain the lark sang aloud, in vain the peacock wailed—­Abel Larinski no longer heard them.  He was thinking of a certain Samuel Brohl; he was reviewing in his mind all the history of this Samuel, a man who never had had a secret from him.  This history was quite as sad a one as that of Abel Larinski, but much less brilliant, much less heroic.  Samuel Brohl prided himself neither on being a patriot nor a paladin; his mother had not been a noble woman with the smile of an angel, and the thought never had occurred to him of fighting for any cause or any person.  He was not a Pole, although born in a Polish province of the Austrian Empire.  His father was a Jew, of German extraction, as indicated by his name, which signifies a place where one sinks in the mire, a bog, swamp, or something of that nature; and he kept a tavern in a wretched little market-town near the eastern frontier of Galicia—­a forlorn tavern, a forlorn tavern-keeper.  Although always on the alert to sell adulterated brandy to his neighbour, and to seize the opportunity to lend him money on usury, he did not thrive:  he was a coward of whose timidity every one took advantage to make him disgorge his ill-gotten gains.  His creed consisted in three doctrines:  he firmly believed that the arts of lying well, of stealing well, and of receiving a blow in the face without apparently noticing it, were the most useful arts to human life; but, of the three, the last was the only one that he practised successfully.  His intentions were good, but his intellect deficient.  This arrant rogue was only a petty knave that any one could dupe.