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advanced, as though to embrace me. ‘Bravo! bravo! that’s
splendid; ‘topping,’ I should say, like you—‘sporting,’ I sup-
pose I ought to say, only I’m a hundred-and-one, a woman
of the old school,’ exclaimed the lady, uttering, on behalf of
the voiceless Champs-Elysées, their thanks to Gilberte for
having come, without letting herself be frightened away by
the weather. ‘You are like me, faithful at all costs to our old
Champs-Elysées; we are two brave souls! You wouldn’t be-
lieve me, I dare say, if I told you that I love them, even like
this. This snow (I know, you’ll laugh at me), it makes me
think of ermine!’ And the old lady began to laugh herself.
The first of these days—to which the snow, a symbol of
the powers that were able to deprive me of the sight of Gil-
berte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost
the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the
outward form and almost forbade the use of the custom-
ary scene of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it
were, in dust-sheets—that day, none the less, marked a stage
in the progress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first
sorrow that she was to share with me. There were only our
two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with
her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but also on
her part—as though she had come there solely to please me,
and in such weather—it seemed to me as touching as if, on
one of those days on which she had been invited to a party,
she had given it up in order to come to me in the Champs-
Elysées; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the
future of a friendship which could remain so much alive
amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surround-

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