CHAPTER VII.

THESE events occupied so much time, that June had numbered more than half

its days, before we again commenced our long-protracted journey. The day

after my return to Versailles, six men, from among those I had left at

Villeneuve-la-Guiard, arrived, with intelligence, that the rest of the

troop had already proceeded towards Switzerland. We went forward in the

same track.

It is strange, after an interval of time, to look back on a period, which,

though short in itself, appeared, when in actual progress, to be drawn out

interminably. By the end of July we entered Dijon; by the end of July those

hours, days, and weeks had mingled with the ocean of forgotten time, which

in their passage teemed with fatal events and agonizing sorrow. By the end

of July, little more than a month had gone by, if man's life were measured

by the rising and setting of the sun: but, alas! in that interval ardent

youth had become grey-haired; furrows deep and uneraseable were trenched in

the blooming cheek of the young mother; the elastic limbs of early manhood,

paralyzed as by the burthen of years, assumed the decrepitude of age.

Nights passed, during whose fatal darkness the sun grew old before it rose;

and burning days, to cool whose baleful heat the balmy eve, lingering far

in eastern climes, came lagging and ineffectual; days, in which the dial,

radiant in its noon-day station, moved not its shadow the space of a little

hour, until a whole life of sorrow had brought the sufferer to an untimely

grave.

535

The Last Man