(1)
Out of a cloudless sky a hard, bright, metallic sun was shining upon Paris, as it had shone, without variation, for the last five weeks, looking down unwinking on a Terror worse than that of '93. And along the deserted streets its companion, the glacial East wind, frolicked in a dance of death, stirring the April dust, and fluttering, on the Pont Neuf, the black flag which Henri Quatre held in his hands of stone. Neither Charles X nor Louis-Philippe reigned in Paris now, but the cholera. Long ago the supply of hearses had proved insufficient, and there crawled along, to gather up the daily harvest of eight or nine hundred dead, artillery waggons, furniture vans, even fiacres. Even so, a sheeted corpse could often be seen in a doorway awaiting burial—to receive it, perhaps, at the hands of that devoted company of young men which numbered some of the first names of France. Yet the machinery of life worked on as usual—the Chambers and the law courts sat, the Bourse was open, professors lectured and the theatres were far from empty, though not a soul had more than half a hope of seeing the sun rise next day, and every time a man left his home he said farewell to wife and child.
From an archway in the long Rue de Sèvres, literally a street of the dead, for on one side at least there was not a single house unstricken, came suddenly a tall priest in a cassock, a garb not seen till now, in the streets of Paris, since the Days of July. His eyes, sunk in a tired, strained face, blinked a little as they met the light, for it had been dark in the garret where he had just confessed the dying man—the fourth cholera patient whom he had visited that day. He pulled the cloak he was wearing closer over his breast as he turned north-eastward and met the wind.
As he crossed the end of the Rue du Bac a fiacre passed him at a lumbering trot, a coffin across the seat. Ere the noise and rattle had died away in the sunny, silent street, the priest heard alert steps behind him, and a voice that he knew well crying, "Prosper! Prosper! que diable! stop a moment!"
Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon slackened his pace and turned his head, but did not stop. "I have just come from a case."
Armand, arriving abreast of his cousin, sniffed at the saturated handkerchief which he held. "Peste, so I supposed. (By the way, how very apt is that expletive just now!) But everybody has either come from a case, or is going to a case ... or is about to become a case, so that is nothing. I will walk with you; I am going this way."
"How is our grandmother?" asked the priest, as they fell into step together.
"Never better. Strange how she fears a cold and defies the plague. She keeps her rooms inundated with camphor and chloride. But Madame de Camain died last night, and the Comtesse de Montlivault, I hear this morning, is 'prise.'".
"God have mercy on them!" said Prosper, crossing himself. "It seems to me that in the last few days the Faubourg St. Germain has suffered more than the poorer quarters."
"That is so, I believe," returned his cousin. "Figure to yourself that the rabbit warren of the Palais-Royal is apparently more healthy than our large houses with their gardens, for I am told that there has not been a single case in those airless glass passages."