Thus all the world are exchanging good wishes and presents to-day.  I alone have nothing to give or to receive.  Poor Solitary!  I do not even know one chosen being for whom I might offer a prayer.

Then let my wishes for a happy New Year go and seek out all my unknown friends—­lost in the multitude which murmurs like the ocean at my feet!

To you first, hermits in cities, for whom death and poverty have created a solitude in the midst of the crowd! unhappy laborers, who are condemned to toil in melancholy, and eat your daily bread in silence and desertion, and whom God has withdrawn from the intoxicating pangs of love and friendship!

To you, fond dreamers, who pass through life with your eyes turned toward some polar star, while you tread with indifference over the rich harvests of reality!

To you, honest fathers, who lengthen out the evening to maintain your families! to you, poor widows, weeping and working by a cradle! to you, young men, resolutely set to open for yourselves a path in life, large enough to lead through it the wife of your choice! to you, all brave soldiers of work and of self-sacrifice!

To you, lastly, whatever your title and your name, who love good, who pity the suffering; who walk through the world like the symbolical Virgin of Byzantium, with both arms open to the human race!

Here I am suddenly interrupted by loud and increasing chirpings.  I look about me:  my window is surrounded with sparrows picking up the crumbs of bread which in my brown study I had just scattered on the roof.  At this sight a flash of light broke upon my saddened heart.  I deceived myself just now, when I complained that I had nothing to give:  thanks to me, the sparrows of this part of the town will have their New-Year’s gifts!

Twelve o’clock.—­A knock at my door; a poor girl comes in, and greets me by name.  At first I do not recollect her; but she looks at me, and smiles.  Ah! it is Paulette!  But it is almost a year since I have seen her, and Paulette is no longer the same:  the other day she was a child, now she is almost a young woman.

Paulette is thin, pale, and miserably clad; but she has always the same open and straightforward look—­the same mouth, smiling at every word, as if to court your sympathy—­the same voice, somewhat timid, yet expressing fondness.  Paulette is not pretty—­she is even thought plain; as for me, I think her charming.  Perhaps that is not on her account, but on my own.  Paulette appears to me as one of my happiest recollections.

It was the evening of a public holiday.  Our principal buildings were illuminated with festoons of fire, a thousand flags waved in the night winds, and the fireworks had just shot forth their spouts of flame into the midst of the Champ de Mars.  Suddenly, one of those unaccountable alarms which strike a multitude with panic fell upon the dense crowd:  they cry out, they rush on headlong; the weaker ones fall, and the frightened crowd tramples them down in its convulsive struggles.  I escaped from the confusion by a miracle, and was hastening away, when the cries of a perishing child arrested me:  I reentered that human chaos, and, after unheard-of exertions, I brought Paulette out of it at the peril of my life.