The artist had not the courage to pull them up, for he thought that these flowers might perhaps hold something of his dead love.

As the gardener asked him what was to be done with the roses and pansies he had brought with him, Jacques bade him plant them on a neighboring grave, newly dug, the poor grave of some poor creature, without any border and having no other memorial over it than a piece of wood stuck in the ground and surmounted by a crown of flowers in blackened paper, the scant offering of some pauper's grief.

Jacques left the cemetery in quite a different frame of mind to what he had entered it.

He looked with happy curiosity at the bright spring sunshine, the same that had so often gilded Francine's locks when she ran about the fields culling wildflowers with her white hands.

Quite a swarm of pleasant thoughts hummed in his heart.