When he at length reached Courbevoie, the night was very dark.  Paris, looking like a patch of star-sprent sky that had fallen upon the black earth, seemed to him to wear a forbidding aspect, as though angry at his return.  Then he felt very faint, and his legs almost gave way beneath him as he descended the hill.  As he crossed the Neuilly bridge he sustained himself by clinging to the parapet, and bent over and looked at the Seine rolling inky waves between its dense, massy banks.  A red lamp on the water seemed to be watching him with a sanguineous eye.  And then he had to climb the hill if he would reach Paris on its summit yonder.  The hundreds of leagues which he had already travelled were as nothing to it.  That bit of a road filled him with despair.  He would never be able, he thought, to reach yonder light crowned summit.  The spacious avenue lay before him with its silence and its darkness, its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets.  The squat yellow flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness.  And Florent seemed to make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer, to be carrying Paris away into the far depths of the night.  At last he fancied that the gas lamps, with their single eyes, were running off on either hand, whisking the road away with them; and then, overcome by vertigo, he stumbled and fell on the roadway like a log.

Now he was lying at ease on his couch of greenery, which seemed to him soft as a feather bed.  He had slightly raised his head so as to keep his eyes on the luminous haze which was spreading above the dark roofs which he could divine on the horizon.  He was nearing his goal, carried along towards it, with nothing to do but to yield to the leisurely jolts of the waggon; and, free from all further fatigue, he now only suffered from hunger.  Hunger, indeed, had once more awoke within him with frightful and wellnigh intolerable pangs.  His limbs seemed to have fallen asleep; he was only conscious of the existence of his stomach, horribly cramped and twisted as by a red-hot iron.  The fresh odour of the vegetables, amongst which he was lying, affected him so keenly that he almost fainted away.  He strained himself against that piled-up mass of food with all his remaining strength, in order to compress his stomach and silence its groans.  And the nine other waggons behind him, with their mountains of cabbages and peas, their piles of artichokes, lettuces, celery, and leeks, seemed to him to be slowly overtaking him, as though to bury him whilst he was thus tortured by hunger beneath an avalanche of food.  Presently the procession halted, and there was a sound of deep voices.  They had reached the barriers, and the municipal customs officers were examining the waggons.  A moment later Florent entered Paris, in a swoon, lying atop of the carrots, with clenched teeth.