Read "The Cream of the Jest" by James Branch Cabell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
They waited in a big dark room of the Conciergerie, with many other condemned émigrants, until the tumbrils should come to fetch them to the Place de la Révolution. They stood beneath a narrow barred window, set high in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the girl's face visible. Misery was about them, death waited without: and it did not matter a pennyworth.
"Ettarre, I know today that all my life I have been seeking you. Very long ago when I was a child it was made clear that you awaited me somewhere; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for your coming with a longing which has not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I still believed you waited somewhere -- till I should find you, as I inevitably must, or soon or late. Did I go upon a journey to some unfamiliar place? -- it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your home. I could never pass a walled garden where green treetops showed without suspecting, even while I shrugged to think how wild was the imagining, that there was only the wall between us. I did not know the color of your eyes, but I knew what I would read there. And for a fevered season I appeared to encounter many women of earth who resembled you -- "