Alas! the deaths are so sudden and numerous and frightful that there is hardly time to bury the dead.  During day the survivors are chained to the earth by hard but necessary toil; and only in the evening, when they return from the fields, are they able, though sinking with fatigue, to dig those other furrows, in which their brethren are to lie heaped like grains of corn.

And this valley is not the only one that has seen the desolation.  During a series of fatal years, many villages, many towns, many cities, many great countries, have seen, like this valley, their hearths deserted and cold—­have seen, like this valley, mourning take the place of joy, and the death-knell substituted for the noise of festival—­have wept in the same day for their many dead, and buried them at night by the lurid glare of torches.

For, during those fatal years, an awful wayfarer had slowly journeyed over the earth, from one pole to the other—­from the depths of India and Asia to the ice of Siberia—­from the ice of Siberia to the borders of the seas of France.

This traveller, mysterious as death, slow as eternity, implacable as fate, terrible as the hand of heaven, was the cholera!

The tolling of bells and the funeral chants still rose from the depths of the valley to the summit of the hill, like the complaining of a mighty voice; the glare of the funeral torches was still seen afar through the mist of evening; it was the hour of twilight—­that strange hour, which gives to the most solid forms a vague, indefinite fantastic appearance—­when the sound of firm and regular footsteps was heard on the stony soil of the rising ground, and, between the black trunks of the trees, a man passed slowly onward.

His figure was tall, his head was bowed upon his breast; his countenance was noble, gentle, and sad; his eyebrows, uniting in the midst, extended from one temple to the other, like a fatal mark on his forehead.

This man did not seem to hear the distant tolling of so many funeral bells—­and yet, a few days before, repose and happiness, health and joy, had reigned in those villages through which he had slowly passed, and which he now left behind him, mourning and desolate.  But the traveller continued on his way, absorbed in his own reflections.

“The 13th of February approaches,” thought he; “the day approaches, in which the descendants of my beloved sister, the last scions of our race, should meet in Paris.  Alas! it is now a hundred and fifty years since, for the third time, persecution scattered this family over all the earth—­this family, that I have watched over with tenderness for eighteen centuries, through all its migrations and exiles, its changes of religion, fortune, and name!

“Oh! for this family, descended from the sister of the poor shoemaker,[2] what grandeur and what abasement, what obscurity and what splendor, what misery and what glory!  By how many crimes has it been sullied, by how many virtues honored!  The history of this single family is the history of the human race!