Now she is in the street. Where is she going? Everything seems deserted already. Desiree walks rapidly, wrapped in her little shawl, head erect, dry-eyed. Not knowing the way, she walks straight ahead.
The dark, narrow streets of the Marais, where gas-jets twinkle at long intervals, cross and recross and wind about, and again and again in her feverish course she goes over the same ground. There is always something between her and the river. And to think that, at that very hour, almost in the same quarter, some one else is wandering through the streets, waiting, watching, desperate! Ah! if they could but meet. Suppose she should accost that feverish watcher, should ask him to direct her:
"I beg your pardon, Monsieur. How can I get to the Seine?"
He would recognize her at once.
"What! Can it be you, Mam'zelle Zizi? What are you doing out-of-doors at this time of night?"
"I am going to die, Frantz. You have taken away all my pleasure in living."
Thereupon he, deeply moved, would seize her, press her to his heart and carry her away in his arms, saying:
"Oh! no, do not die. I need you to comfort me, to cure all the wounds the other has inflicted on me."
But that is a mere poet's dream, one of the meetings that life can not bring about.
Streets, more streets, then a square and a bridge whose lanterns make another luminous bridge in the black water. Here is the river at last. The mist of that damp, soft autumn evening causes all of this huge Paris, entirely strange to her as it is, to appear to her like an enormous confused mass, which her ignorance of the landmarks magnifies still more. This is the place where she must die.