there in this perversion of justice, this perpetual mockery of Fate?  At times the influence of his early education would resume its sway, and he would ask himself whether all this apparent contradiction were not a secret admonition from on high, warning him that he had not been created to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of this world, and ought, therefore, to turn his attention toward things eternal, and renounce the perishable delights of the flesh?

“If so,” thought he, irreverently, “the warning comes rather late, and it would have answered the purpose better had I been allowed to continue in the narrow way of obscure poverty!” Now that the enervating influence of a more prosperous atmosphere had weakened his courage, and cooled the ardor of his piety, his faith began to totter like an old wall.  His religious beliefs seemed to have been wrecked by the same storm which had destroyed his passionate hopes of love, and left him stranded and forlorn without either haven or pilot, blown hither and thither solely by the violence of his passion.

By degrees he took an aversion to his home, and would spend entire days in the woods.  Their secluded haunts, already colored by the breath of autumn, became more attractive to him as other refuge failed him.  They were his consolation; his doubts, weakness, and amorous regrets, found sympathy and indulgence under their silent shelter.  He felt less lonely, less humiliated, less prosaic among these great forest depths, these lofty ash-trees, raising their verdant branches to heaven.  He found he could more easily evoke the seductive image of Reine Vincart in these calm solitudes, where the recollections of the previous springtime mingled with the phantoms of his heated imagination and clothed themselves with almost living forms.  He seemed to see the young girl rising from the mists of the distant valleys.  The least fluttering of the leaves heralded her fancied approach.  At times the hallucination was so complete that he could see, in the interlacing of the branches, the undulations of her supple form, and the graceful outlines of her profile.  Then he would be seized by an insane desire to reach the fugitive and speak to her once more, and would go tearing along the brushwood for that purpose.  Now and then, in the half light formed by the hanging boughs, he would see rays of golden light, coming straight down to the ground, and resting there lightly like diaphanous apparitions.  Sometimes the rustling of birds taking flight, would sound in his ears like the timid frou-frou of a skirt, and Julien, fascinated by the mysterious charm of these indefinite objects, and following the impulse of their mystical suggestions, would fling himself impetuously into the jungle, repeating to him self the words of the “Canticle of Canticles”:  “I hear the voice of my beloved; behold! she cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.”  He would continue to press forward in pursuit of the intangible apparition, until he sank with exhaustion near some stream or fountain.  Under the influence of the fever, which was consuming his brain, he would imagine the trickling water to be the song of a feminine voice.  He would wind his arms around the young saplings, he would tear the berries from the bushes, pressing them against his thirsty lips, and imagining their odoriferous sweetness to be a fond caress from the loved one.